There are continuing uncertainties about the first appearance of modern humans, but the divergence is now put as far back as 260,000–350,000 (105) years ago (Schlebusch et al. 2017). By 10,000 bce there were a few million people (106) on all habitable continents, all of them foragers. By 4000 bce the total approached 10 million (107), with increasing numbers of people living in settled agricultural societies, a transition that in some regions took only a few thousands of years to accomplish.
