New video depicts human migration across generations October 18,
2012 Tags: Evolution + Development CAMBRIDGE, Mass. —Throughout
history, people have been on the move. Now we can actually “see”
our ancestors cross the ocean blue to North America or make the
long voyage to Australia. A new video created by Whitehead
Institute in collaboration with the genealogical website
Geni.com shows the births of millions people, from the Middle
Ages through the early 20th Century, as single dots on a black
background. As time advances, those births define the coastlines
and countries of Europe and Great Britain, then the Pilgrims’
voyage to the New World, the migration to Australia, the
overland expansion of the United States through the Oregon Trail
and Gold Rush, and the founding of Johannesburg, South Africa.
The video project was led by Whitehead Fellow Yaniv Erlich,
whose work harnesses the power of computers to transform massive
amounts of data into usable information. Erlich and Michael
Gershovits, then a student i