This archive covers positive developments in migration and settlement — from policy reforms and integration programs to community-led initiatives that help people build new lives. Stories here highlight what works when societies welcome and support people on the move.
Twyfelfontein’s rock engravings, carved into a desert valley in what is now Namibia, trace back as far as 10,000 B.C.E., when Stone Age hunter-gatherers settled around a hidden spring. Over 2,500 carvings have been documented across 212 sandstone slabs, including animals paired with their tracks. It remains one of Africa’s richest windows into early human imagination.
The Cueva of eastern Panama weren’t actually one people. When Spanish colonists arrived in the early 1500s, they flattened a mosaic of distinct Indigenous communities under a single name, likely linked by a shared trade language rather than a shared identity. Recognizing that label as a colonial invention is helping scholars ask better questions about who these peoples really were.
The Migration Period, roughly 300 to 568 C.E., set hundreds of thousands of people moving across Eurasia — Goths, Vandals, Franks, Slavs, and more crossing rivers and old Roman frontiers. In 406 alone, a coalition of some 200,000 forded the frozen Rhine. From that churn emerged the rough outlines of modern Europe.
Madagascar’s first settlers arrived sometime between 350 and 700 C.E., crossing roughly 6,000 kilometers of open Indian Ocean in outrigger canoes from what is now Indonesia. Centuries later, Bantu-speaking peoples joined them from East Africa, and the two founding populations gradually merged. The result was the Malagasy language and people — and one of humanity’s last great landmasses finally inhabited.
The Lucayan people spent roughly 800 years paddling dugout canoes from island to island, settling a 1,400-kilometer chain of Bahamian islands that had never before been inhabited. By around 1500, close to 40,000 people lived across the archipelago’s 19 largest islands — a quiet testament to generations of seamanship, patience, and accumulated knowledge of the sea.
The Ba-Tonga settled the middle Zambezi valley in what is now southern Zambia around the 13th and 14th centuries, part of the vast Bantu migrations that reshaped sub-Saharan Africa over millennia. They built a decentralized society organized around the river’s floods, farming sorghum and millet in rhythm with its seasons. Seven centuries later, their language and communities endure.
Mehrgarh, a Neolithic village in the foothills of today’s Balochistan, Pakistan, was home to farmers growing wheat and herding cattle as early as the seventh millennium B.C.E. Its graves held turquoise beads and lapis lazuli sourced hundreds of miles away, and eleven drilled molars from nine adults — the oldest known dentistry on living people. A quiet reminder that South Asia shaped the Neolithic story from its earliest chapters.
Village farming in Iran took root around 8000 B.C.E. in the Zagros Mountains, where people began planting seeds, tending herds, and building homes meant to last. At sites like Ganj Dareh and Ali Kosh, small communities of mud-brick houses stored grain through winter. It was one of humanity’s earliest sustained experiments in staying put.
Around 9,000 B.C.E., small bands of hunters stopped roaming the Peruvian Andes and settled in, more than 4,000 meters up. Ancient DNA shows their descendants evolved stronger hearts to handle the thin air — a different path than Tibetans took. It’s a quiet reminder of how many ways the human body can learn to stay.
Around 9000 B.C.E., hunter-gatherers began settling beside a freshwater spring near the Jordan River, founding what would become Jericho. Within a thousand years, residents had cultivated wheat and barley and raised a nine-meter stone tower with an internal staircase. It stands as one of humanity’s earliest glimpses of permanent, communal life.
