How long did it take for the original North African humans to populate the rest of the world?

Question

Very roughly - an approximate time scale is fine (are we talking hundreds, thousands or millions of years?) Heh...sorry I'm very ignorant!

Answer 1

Have a look under the link.

There were different branches on the human tree of development,
the actual existing one "homo sapiens sapiens" seems to leave Africa over the land bridge to Arabia around 60 000 years ago ("Black Eva hypothesis"/ "Out of Africa")) and the original group was considered to be around 400 people. Interestingly it seems out anchestors traveled the coastline and did only later penetrate inland.

Answer 2

No need to apologize at all. This is a great question and it all depends on how you define "humans". There were several possible migrations of hominids out of Africa. Those that became us took about a hundred thousand years to cover the Earth. Remember, when we started out, there were probably only a few thousand of us on the planet, so much of this time was just trying to stabilize a population and expand.