Then, as climates cooled, our ancestors seem to have left the Middle East to the Neanderthals, whose bodies were better adapted to colder climates. They didn’t return until about sixty thousand years ago. However, some humans may have traveled east into Central Asia and South Asia. One reason for thinking this is that humans reached Sahul (the ice-age continent that included Australia, Papua New Guinea, and Tasmania) between fifty thousand and sixty thousand years ago. Migrants leaving Africa sixty thousand
