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I'm Rufus Christian and this is the next big idea.

Today, how did the first people arrive in the Americas?

Sometimes when I'm ordering Thai food on my electric scooter, I catch myself daydreaming about what it was like to be a member of an ancient nomadic tribe.

Imagine fishing, hunting, tracking animals, exploring new lands, with all the intelligence of modern humans applied not to wortl or zoom lighting, but rather to reading the tracks of animals and the subtleties of paw prints and the bends in the grass.

To building outrigger canoes with handcrafted axes and then crossing oceans.

For most of the last 300,000 years, this was how humans lived.

Today, if you were to dress me, you and a dozen friends at loincloths and drop us off at the woods, how long would we last?

Not long at all.

I can't even begin to imagine how poorly we would have faired 15,000 years ago, when those woods were populated by dire wolves and masts of dogs and cave bears.

It's no wonder then that many of us, when we stop to think about the skills required of our ice age forebears, can't help but feel a sense of awe.

And it's because of that awe that for hundreds of years now, we have been gradually piecing together a history of our species, developing a picture that is nothing short of extraordinary.

The first anatomically modern humans emerge in Africa around 300,000 years ago.

About 210,000 years ago, some of them traveled to Greece.

Over the next few millennia, some made it to Israel and China.

And then about 70,000 years ago, a larger collection of early humans got antsy and headed off in droves to explore the world.

They spread out through Europe and Asia. They encountered other human species, denies events and the Andertals.

They built boats and sailed to Australia. And some moved into the then uninhabited Americas.

We've pieced this remarkable legacy together using a few tools, oral history, archaeology, linguistics, and recently genetics.

But there is still much we don't know.

Fortunately, a new generation of scholars is rapidly producing answers.

One such scholar is the archaeologist David Wengrow, who, along with a late David Graber, made headlines and bestseller lists last winter with their book The Dawn of Everything, which presents astonishing evidence of the vast scale, political ingenuity, and technological sophistication of early human settlements.

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