Cov­er­age of the refugee cri­sis peaked in 2015. By the end of the year, note researchers at the Uni­ver­si­ty of Bergen, “this was one of the hottest top­ics, not only for politi­cians, but for par­tic­i­pants in the pub­lic debate,” includ­ing far-right xeno­phobes giv­en mega­phones. What­ev­er their intent, Daniel Trilling argues at The Guardian, the explo­sion of refugee sto­ries had the effect of fram­ing “these new­ly arrived peo­ple as oth­ers, peo­ple from ‘over there,’ who had lit­tle to do with Europe itself and were strangers.”

Such a char­ac­ter­i­za­tion ignores the cru­cial con­text of Europe’s pres­ence in near­ly every part of the world over the past sev­er­al cen­turies. And it frames mass migra­tion as extra­or­di­nary, not the norm. The cri­sis aspect is real, the result of dan­ger­ous­ly accel­er­at­ed move­ment of cap­i­tal and cli­mate change. But mass move­ments of peo­ple seek­ing bet­ter con­di­tions, safe­ty, oppor­tu­ni­ty, etc. may be the old­est and most com­mon fea­ture of human his­to­ry, as the Sci­ence Insid­er video shows above.

The yel­low arrows that fly across the globe in the dra­mat­ic ani­ma­tion make it seem like ear­ly humans moved by bul­let train. But when con­se­quen­tial shifts in cli­mate occurred at a glacial pace—and economies were built on what peo­ple car­ried on their backs—mass migra­tions hap­pened over the span of thou­sands of years. Yet they hap­pened con­tin­u­ous­ly through­out the last 200,000 to 70,000 years of human his­to­ry, give or take. We may nev­er know what drove so many of our dis­tant ances­tors to spread around the world.

But how can we know what routes they took to get there? “Thanks to the amaz­ing work of anthro­pol­o­gists and pale­on­tol­o­gists like those work­ing on Nation­al Geographic’s Geno­graph­ic Project,” Sci­ence Insid­er explains, “we can begin to piece togeth­er the sto­ry of our ances­tors.” The Geno­graph­ic Project was launched by Nation­al Geo­graph­ic in 2005, “in col­lab­o­ra­tion with sci­en­tists and uni­ver­si­ties around the world.” Since then, it has col­lect­ed the genet­ic data of over 1 mil­lion peo­ple, “with a goal of reveal­ing pat­terns of human migra­tion.”

The project assures us it is “anony­mous, non­med­ical, and non­prof­it.” Par­tic­i­pants sub­mit­ted their own DNA with Nation­al Geographic’s “Geno” ances­try kits (and may still do so until next month). They can receive a “deep ances­try” report and cus­tomized migra­tion map; and they can learn how close­ly they are relat­ed to “his­tor­i­cal genius­es,” a cat­e­go­ry that, for some rea­son, includes Jesse James.

Do projects like these veer close to recre­at­ing the “race sci­ence” of pre­vi­ous cen­turies? Are they valid ways of recon­struct­ing the “human sto­ry” of ances­try, as Nation­al Geo­graph­ic puts it? Crit­ics like sci­ence jour­nal­ist Angela Sai­ni are skep­ti­cal. “DNA test­ing can­not tell you that,” she says in an inter­view on NPR, but it can “make us believe that iden­ti­ty is bio­log­i­cal, when iden­ti­ty is cul­tur­al.” Nation­al Geo­graph­ic seems to dis­avow asso­ci­a­tions between genet­ics and race, writ­ing, “sci­ence defines you by your DNA, soci­ety defines you by the col­or of your skin.” But it does so at the end of a video about a group of peo­ple bond­ing over their sim­i­lar fea­tures.

Despite the sig­nif­i­cance mod­ern humans have ascribed to vari­a­tions in phe­no­type, race is a cul­tur­al­ly defined cat­e­go­ry and not a sci­en­tif­ic one, argues Joseph L. Graves, pro­fes­sor of bio­log­i­cal sci­ences at the Joint School of Nanoscience and Nano­engi­neer­ing. “Every­thing we know about our genet­ics has proven that we are far more alike than we are dif­fer­ent. If more peo­ple under­stood that, it would be eas­i­er to debunk the myth that peo­ple of a cer­tain race are ‘nat­u­ral­ly’ one way or anoth­er,” or that refugees and asy­lum seek­ers are dan­ger­ous oth­ers instead of just like every oth­er human who has moved around the world over the last 200,000 years.

Note: An ear­li­er ver­sion of this post appeared on our site in 2019.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Col­or­ful Ani­ma­tion Visu­al­izes 200 Years of Immi­gra­tion to the U.S. (1820-Present)

Where Did Human Beings Come From? 7 Mil­lion Years of Human Evo­lu­tion Visu­al­ized in Six Min­utes

Watch Ani­ma­tions Show­ing How Humans Migrat­ed Across the World Over the Past 60,000 Years

How the Human Pop­u­la­tion Reached 8 Bil­lion: An Ani­mat­ed Video Cov­ers 300,000 Years of His­to­ry in Four Min­utes

Josh Jones is a writer and musi­cian based in Durham, NC. 

Every­where you look, you can find traces of the ancient Roman civ­i­liza­tion from which the mod­ern West descends. That’s espe­cial­ly true if you hap­pen to be look­ing in Europe, though echoes of Latin make them­selves heard in major lan­guages used all over the world. Take, for exam­ple, the com­mon Eng­lish word itin­er­ary, mean­ing a planned route for trav­el, which descends from iter, the Latin word for a jour­ney, route, or path. The Romans even­tu­al­ly spoke of itin­er­aria, which meant more or less the same thing as we do when we speak of our trav­el itin­er­aries. Now, bridg­ing these dis­tant eras, we have Itiner‑e, a new online map of ancient Rome’s road net­work, the most com­pre­hen­sive yet.

Orig­i­nal­ly envi­sioned as a kind of “Google Maps for Roman roads,” Itiner‑e is a project of Tom Brugh­mans of Aarhus Uni­ver­si­ty, and Pau de Soto Caña­mares and Adam Pažout of the Autonomous Uni­ver­si­ty of Barcelona. Its users can dig­i­tal­ly explore near­ly 300,000 kilo­me­ters of roads laid across the vast Roman Empire at its height in the mid-sec­ond cen­tu­ry — or at least as much of that net­work as edu­cat­ed guess­es can recon­struct.

Researchers can only be sure about less than three per­cent of the net­work, with anoth­er sev­en per­cent of ancient Roman roads doc­u­ment­ed in exis­tence if not in pre­cise loca­tion. Regard­less, Itiner‑e is based on an unprece­dent­ed­ly wide (and open) dataset, which incor­po­rates topo­graph­ic map­ping, satel­lite imagery and cen­turies of his­tor­i­cal records.

Among Itin­er-e’s many fea­tures is a con­fi­dence rat­ing, which shows just how con­fi­dent we can be that any giv­en road actu­al­ly looked like it does on the map. You can also view the whole thing in 3D to get a sense of the ele­va­tions involved in con­struc­tion and trav­el of the net­work; use a rout­ing tool to deter­mine sug­gest­ed routes around the empire “by foot, ox cart or don­key”; and even check satel­lite imagery to find still-extant parts of Roman roads and draw com­par­isons with the same parts of the world today. Though a fair few major Roman roads have evolved into cur­rent routes for trains and auto­mo­biles, we can’t exact­ly trav­el on them in the same way the Romans did. Still, when next you plan a Euro­pean itin­er­ary of your own, con­sid­er punch­ing it in to Itiner‑e and see­ing how the jour­ney most like­ly would’ve been made 1,875 years ago.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

How the Ancient Romans Built Their Roads, the Life­lines of Their Vast Empire

The Roads of Ancient Rome Visu­al­ized in the Style of Mod­ern Sub­way Maps

A Map Show­ing How the Ancient Romans Envi­sioned the World in 40 AD

Built to Last: How Ancient Roman Bridges Can Still With­stand the Weight of Mod­ern Cars & Trucks

The Roman Roads and Bridges You Can Still Trav­el Today

Plan Your Trip Across the Roads of the Roman Empire, Using Mod­ern Web Map­ping Tech­nol­o­gy

Based in Seoul, Col­in Marshall writes and broad­casts on cities, lan­guage, and cul­ture. His projects include the Sub­stack newslet­ter Books on Cities and the book The State­less City: a Walk through 21st-Cen­tu­ry Los Ange­les. Fol­low him on the social net­work for­mer­ly known as Twit­ter at @colinmarshall.

We all know Mar­shall McLuhan’s pithy, end­less­ly quotable line “the medi­um is the mes­sage,” but rarely do we stop to ask which one comes first. The devel­op­ment of com­mu­ni­ca­tion tech­nolo­gies may gen­uine­ly present us with a chick­en or egg sce­nario. After all, only a cul­ture that already prized con­stant visu­al stim­uli but gross­ly under­val­ued phys­i­cal move­ment would have invent­ed and adopt­ed tele­vi­sion.

In Soci­ety of the Spec­ta­cle, Guy Debord ties the ten­den­cy toward pas­sive visu­al con­sump­tion to “com­mod­i­ty fetishism, the dom­i­na­tion of soci­ety by ‘intan­gi­ble as well as tan­gi­ble things,’ which reach­es its absolute ful­fill­ment in the spec­ta­cle, where the tan­gi­ble world is replaced by a selec­tion of images which exist above it, and which simul­ta­ne­ous­ly impose them­selves as the tan­gi­ble par excel­lence.” It seems an apt descrip­tion of a screen-addict­ed cul­ture.

What can we say, then, of a cul­ture addict­ed to charts and graphs? Ear­li­est exam­ples of the form were often more elab­o­rate than we’re used to see­ing, hand-drawn with care and atten­tion. They were also not coy about their ambi­tions: to con­dense the vast dimen­sions of space and time into a two-dimen­sion­al, col­or-cod­ed for­mat. To tidi­ly sum up all human and nat­ur­al his­to­ry in easy-to-read visu­al metaphors.

This was as much a reli­gious project as it was a philo­soph­i­cal, sci­en­tif­ic, his­tor­i­cal, polit­i­cal, and ped­a­gog­i­cal one. The domains are hope­less­ly entwined in the 18th and 19th cen­turies. We should not be sur­prised to see them freely min­gle in the ear­li­est info­graph­ics. The cre­ators of such images were poly­maths, and deeply devout. Joseph Priest­ley, Eng­lish chemist, philoso­pher, the­olo­gian, polit­i­cal the­o­rist and gram­mar­i­an, made sev­er­al visu­al chronolo­gies rep­re­sent­ing “the lives of two thou­sand men between 1200 BC and 1750 AD” (con­vey­ing a clear mes­sage about the sole impor­tance of men).

“After Priest­ley,” writes the Pub­lic Domain Review, “time­lines flour­ished, but they gen­er­al­ly lacked any sense of the dimen­sion­al­i­ty of time, rep­re­sent­ing the past as a uni­form march from left to right.” Emma Willard, “one of the century’s most influ­en­tial edu­ca­tors” set out to update the tech­nol­o­gy, “to invest chronol­o­gy with a sense of per­spec­tive.” In her 1836 Pic­ture of Nations; or Per­spec­tive Sketch of the Course of Empire, above (view and down­load high res­o­lu­tion images here), she presents “the bib­li­cal Cre­ation as the apex of a tri­an­gle that then flowed for­ward in time and space toward the view­er.”

The per­spec­tive is also a forced point of view about ori­gins and his­to­ry. But that was exact­ly the point: these are didac­tic tools meant for text­books and class­rooms. Willard, “America’s first pro­fes­sion­al female map­mak­er,” writes Maria Popo­va, was also a “pio­neer­ing edu­ca­tor,” who found­ed “the first women’s high­er edu­ca­tion insti­tu­tion in the Unit­ed States when she was still in her thir­ties…. In her ear­ly for­ties, she set about com­pos­ing and pub­lish­ing a series of his­to­ry text­books that raised the stan­dards and sen­si­bil­i­ties of schol­ar­ship.”

Willard rec­og­nized that lin­ear graphs of time did not accu­rate­ly do jus­tice to a three-dimen­sion­al expe­ri­ence of the world. Humans are “embod­ied crea­tures who yearn to locate them­selves in space and time.” The illu­sion of space and time on the flat page was an essen­tial fea­ture of Willard’s under­ly­ing pur­pose: “lay­ing out the ground-plan of the intel­lect, so far as the whole range of his­to­ry is con­cerned.” A prop­er under­stand­ing of a Great Man (and at least one Great Woman, Hypa­tia) ver­sion of history—easily con­densed, since there were only around 6,000 years from the cre­ation of the universe—would lead to “enlight­ened and judi­cious sup­port­ers” of democ­ra­cy.

His­to­ry is rep­re­sent­ed lit­er­al­ly as a sacred space in Willard’s 1846 Tem­ple of Time, its prov­i­den­tial begin­nings for­mal­ly bal­anced in equal pro­por­tion to its every mon­u­men­tal stage. Willard’s intent was express­ly patri­ot­ic, her trap­pings self-con­scious­ly clas­si­cal. Her maps of time were ways of sit­u­at­ing the nation as a nat­ur­al suc­ces­sor to the empires of old, which flowed from the divine act of cre­ation. They show a pro­gres­sive widen­ing of the world.

“Half a cen­tu­ry before W.E.B. Du Bois… cre­at­ed his mod­ernist data visu­al­iza­tions for the 1900 World’s Fair,” Popo­va writes, The Tem­ple of Time “won a medal at the 1851 World’s Fair in Lon­don.” Willard accom­pa­nied the info­graph­ic with a state­ment of intent, artic­u­lat­ing a media the­o­ry, over a hun­dred years before McLuhan, that sounds strange­ly antic­i­pa­to­ry of his famous dic­tum.

The poet­ic idea of “the vista of depart­ed years” is made an object of sight; and when the eye is the medi­um, the pic­ture will, by fre­quent inspec­tion, be formed with­in, and for­ev­er remain, wrought into the liv­ing tex­ture of the mind.

Learn more about Emma Willard’s info­graph­ic rev­o­lu­tion at the Pub­lic Domain Review and The Mar­gin­a­lian.

Note: An ear­li­er ver­sion of this post appeared on our site in 2020.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Joseph Priest­ley Visu­al­izes His­to­ry & Great His­tor­i­cal Fig­ures with Two of the Most Influ­en­tial Info­graph­ics Ever (1769)

The His­to­ry of the World in One Beau­ti­ful, 5‑Foot-Long Chart (1931)

180,000 Years of Reli­gion Chart­ed on a “His­tom­ap” in 1943

19th Cen­tu­ry Atlas Cre­ative­ly Visu­al­izes the Expan­sion of Geo­graph­i­cal Knowl­edge Over 4000 Years of World His­to­ry: From the Bib­li­cal flood to the Indus­tri­al Rev­o­lu­tion

Josh Jones is a writer and musi­cian based in Durham, NC. 

In the image above, we see an impres­sive pre-inter­net macro-info­graph­ic called a “His­tom­ap.” Its cre­ator John B. Sparks (who lat­er cre­at­ed “his­tom­aps” of reli­gion and evo­lu­tion) pub­lished the graph­ic in 1931 with Rand McNal­ly. The five-foot-long chart—purportedly cov­er­ing 4,000 years of “world” history—is, in fact, an exam­ple of an ear­ly illus­tra­tion trend called the “out­line,” of which Rebec­ca Onion at Slate writes: “large sub­jects (the his­to­ry of the world! every school of phi­los­o­phy! all of mod­ern physics!) were dis­tilled into a form com­pre­hen­si­ble to the most une­d­u­cat­ed lay­man.” Here we have the full descrip­tion of most every polit­i­cal chart, graph, or ani­ma­tion in U.S.A. Today, most Inter­net news sites, and, of course, The Onion.

The sim­i­lar­i­ty here isn’t sim­ply one of form. The “out­line” func­tioned in much the same way that sim­pli­fied ani­ma­tions do—condensing heavy, con­tentious the­o­ret­i­cal freight trains and ide­o­log­i­cal bag­gage. Rebec­ca Onion describes the chart as an arti­fact very much of its time, pre­sent­ing a ver­sion of his­to­ry promi­nent in the U.S. between the wars. Onion writes:

The chart empha­sizes dom­i­na­tion, using col­or to show how the pow­er of var­i­ous “peo­ples” (a qua­si-racial under­stand­ing of the nature of human groups, quite pop­u­lar at the time) evolved through­out his­to­ry.

Sparks’ map, how­ev­er, remains an inter­est­ing doc­u­ment because of its seem­ing dis­in­ter­est­ed­ness. While the focus on racial­ism and impe­r­i­al con­quest may seem to place Sparks in com­pa­ny with pop­ulist “sci­en­tif­ic” racists of the peri­od like Lothrop Stod­dard (whom Tom Buchanan quotes in Fitzgerald’s Gats­by), it would also seem that his design has much in com­mon with ear­ly Enlight­en­ment fig­ures whose con­cep­tion of time was not nec­es­sar­i­ly lin­ear. Fol­low­ing clas­si­cal mod­els, thinkers like Thomas Hobbes tend­ed to divide his­tor­i­cal epochs into ris­ing and falling actions of var­i­ous peo­ple groups, rather than the grad­ual ascent of one race over all oth­ers towards an end of his­to­ry. For exam­ple, poet Abra­ham Cow­ley writes a com­pressed “uni­ver­sal his­to­ry” in his 1656 poem “To Mr. Hobs,” mov­ing from Aris­to­tle (the “Sta­girite”) to the poem’s sub­ject Thomas Hobbes. The move­ment is pro­gres­sive, yet the his­tor­i­cal rep­re­sen­ta­tives of each civ­i­liza­tion receive some equal weight and sim­i­lar empha­sis.

Long did the mighty Sta­girite retain
The uni­ver­sal Intel­lec­tu­al reign,
Saw his own Coun­treys short-liv’ed Leop­ard slain;
The stronger Roman-Eagle did out-fly,
Oft­ner renewed his Age, and saw that Dy.
Mecha it self, in spight of Mahumet pos­s­est,
And chas’ed by a wild Del­uge from the East,
His Monar­chy new plant­ed in the West.
But as in time each great impe­r­i­al race
Degen­er­ates, and gives some new one place:

The peri­od of Cow­ley rec­og­nized the­o­ries of racial, cul­tur­al, and nat­ur­al suprema­cy, but such qual­i­ties, as in Sparks’ map, were the prod­uct of a long line of suc­ces­sion from equal­ly pow­er­ful and note­wor­thy empires and groups to oth­ers, not a social evo­lu­tion in which a supe­ri­or race nat­u­ral­ly arose. Rand McNal­ly adver­tised the chart as pre­sent­ing “the march of civ­i­liza­tion, from the mud huts of the ancients thru the monar­chis­tic glam­our of the mid­dle ages to the liv­ing panora­ma of life in present day Amer­i­ca.” While the blurb is filled with pseu­do­sci­en­tif­ic colo­nial­ist talk­ing points, the chart itself has the dat­ed, yet strik­ing­ly egal­i­tar­i­an arrange­ment of infor­ma­tion that—like much of the illus­tra­tion in Nation­al Geo­graph­ic—sought to accom­mo­date the best con­sen­sus mod­els of the times, dis­play­ing, but not pros­e­ly­tiz­ing, its bias­es.

Note: An ear­li­er ver­sion of this post appeared on our site in 2013.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

180,000 Years of Reli­gion Chart­ed on a “His­tom­ap” in 1943

The Big Map of Who Lived When Shows Which Cul­tur­al Fig­ures Walked the Earth at the Same Time: From 1200 to Present

Joseph Priest­ley Visu­al­izes His­to­ry & Great His­tor­i­cal Fig­ures with Two of the Most Influ­en­tial Info­graph­ics Ever (1769)

10 Mil­lion Years of Evo­lu­tion Visu­al­ized in an Ele­gant, 5‑Foot Long Info­graph­ic from 1931

The His­to­ry of the World in One Video: Every Year from 200,000 BCE to Today

Josh Jones is a writer and musi­cian based in Durham, NC. Fol­low him at @jdmagness