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.
Southeast Asia’s first settlers arrived at least 65,000 years ago, long before rice paddies or written history. Among them were the Hoabinhians, hunter-gatherers whose stone tools and genetic signatures stretch across the region. When farmers later moved south, they mixed rather than replaced — and hundreds of millions of people today still carry that ancient ancestry.
Stalagmites from central Saudi Arabian caves now prove Arabia turned green at least six times over eight million years. Around 90,000 B.C.E., one of those humid pulses may have carried early Homo sapiens out of Africa — through rivers, grasslands, and a peninsula that history nearly forgot.
Southern Africa became home to early Homo sapiens more than 130,000 years ago, and their descendants never left. At sites like Blombos Cave, these communities engraved ochre with geometric patterns — among the earliest known traces of symbolic thought. Their living descendants, the Khoisan, carry the deepest-rooting branches of the human family tree.
