After its birth on the African continent, over hundreds of thousands of years the human race (homo sapiens) dispersed and settled throughout Eurasia, Asia, North America and South America, as well as Oceania. No other species of animal life has dispersed and moved over such a broad portion of the earth’s surface, such that the human race well merits the title homo mobilitas. Moreover, in contemporary society human beings continue to move about various parts of the world by different methods and with myriad different goals.

This research will focus on such movement of groups of people and seek from an anthropological perspective to explicate the various facets of their history and the various cultural phenomena which have resulted. The history of the human race involves numerous disciplines, including physical anthropology and archaeology, genetics. The goals of this research are to add input from cognitive anthropology, cultural anthropology and linguistics, so as to construct a cross-sectional view of human movement and propose a human movement model.