In 1961, miners at Jebel Irhoud in Morocco broke into a cave and found a skull. It took until 2017 to date it properly: about 300,000 years old, the oldest of our kind ever found. Three adults, a teenager and a child, buried with the gazelles they had hunted.

A child. Named by no one. The first name on the family tree.

At Florisbad in South Africa and Omo Kibish in Ethiopia, early members of the family were already spread across the continent. At Blombos Cave, on the Cape coast, someone mixed red ochre paint in abalone shells 100,000 years ago, and 73,000 years ago drew the oldest known drawing on earth: nine red lines on a flake of stone.

The San peoples of southern Africa carry some of the oldest lineages in the human family.

A small band crossed the Red Sea into Arabia and kept going. Earlier groups had reached the Levant, at Skhul and Qafzeh, and died out. This one lasted. Almost everyone alive outside Africa today comes from that single departure.

A few thousand people, at most. Every non-African face on earth began with them.

They followed the coasts of India and South East Asia, then crossed open sea to Australia, the first ocean voyage in human history. At Madjedbebe, on Mirarr country, and at Lake Mungo, where a man was buried with red ochre 42,000 years ago in the oldest known ritual burial.

Aboriginal Australians: the oldest continuous living culture on earth.

A branch turned west through the Levant into Europe, and met the cold. At Bacho Kiro cave in Bulgaria, a tooth and six bone fragments from about 45,000 years ago are the oldest directly dated members of our family in Europe. Their tools link them to finds as far east as Mongolia, and their DNA shows they had Neanderthal ancestors.

Neanderthals had been in Europe for 400,000 years. The family met them, and mixed.

Others pushed north across Asia and into Siberia, to the edge of the ice. A boy buried near Lake Baikal about 24,000 years ago, at Mal'ta, carried DNA that would later show up in Native Americans and in Europeans alike.

One boy in the snow, linked to two continents.

Over a land bridge where the Bering Strait is now, then south through two continents. Footprints at White Sands, New Mexico, may be 21,000 to 23,000 years old, many of them left by children. At Monte Verde in Chile, a settlement stood by 14,500 years ago. The road ended in Patagonia.

The last stop was 20,000 kilometres from the first. Same family, the whole way.