25,000 years ago ... Right at the peak of the Last Ice Age, most people living on the African continent finally embraced microlithic tools, an innovation that had been around for tens of thousands of years.

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45,000 to 30,000 years ago ... Signs of Late Stone Age culture start appearing across sub-saharan Africa, hinting at long-distance contact between once isolated peoples.

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60,000 to 45,000 years ago ... Signs of cultural change started to appear among hunter gatherers in Africa, leading to the end of the Middle Stone Age, a period that had lasted hundreds of thousands of years.

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12,800 to 11,700 years ago ... In the cold of the Younger Dryas, at the peak of megafauna extinction, the descendants of Clovis fragmented into a range of new cultures across North America.

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Around 13,000 years ago, a wide range of large animal species started disappearing. The circumstances strongly implicate humans.

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13,000 to 12,000 years ago... From megafauna hunters in Tierra del Fuego to Amazonian rock painters, the formation of early South America hunter gatherer societies was a complex process, and a sudden burst of distinct human cultures appeared at the end of the Ice Age.

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The first North American cultures appeared around 13,000 years ago, when megafauna roamed a continent still largely devoid of humans.

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Homo sapiens, the only hominin to colonize every continent on the planet, finally reaches America. But who were the first Americans and when did they arrive?

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