Asia

The movement across the Eurasia land mass eastward of course took many thousands of years. The presence of considerable game and the subsequent need to follow it or move to less depleted regions may account for some of the movement. The move northward may have taken the longest reaching the Pacific Coasts of Siberia by 20000 BCE. The more southward trek across the near east through India and on to SE Asia may have been faster reaching what is now Thailand and Malaysia by 50000 BCE. There are indications that these early migrants were able to build canoes and other boats in order to reach the even then unconnected parts of the Indonesia Archipelago (40000 BCE) and even farther out into Micronesia and Australia by 25000 BCE.

It appears that agriculture was developed indigenously in several parts of Asia and that it did not experience the same kind of migratory wave we see in Europe around 10000 BCE. The Near east may have been first in developing settled agriculture, but already there are signs of it in the Indus Valley by 7000 BCE. Farther East, the development of rice agriculture in both SE Asia and in central China may be dated to around 3000 BCE or even before.