Until around 11,000 to 12,000 years ago, mostly everyone lived as hunter-gatherers, in small groups within the confines of local ecosystems. This means that if you could go back about 12,000 years and see your ancestors, they would likely have been hunter-gatherers.
For more than 95% of our evolutionary history, we lived as hunter-gatherers.
A hunter-gatherer lifestyle required access to large areas of land, and population density was probably closely linked to how productive the local ecosystem was.
The variables which may have influenced the size of populations were such things as, biodiversity, seasonal rainfall, climate, the effects of pathogens and ability to store food.Hunter-gathers around the world, often immigrated when food and other resources like water and firewood become scarce. This migration led to humans colonizing most of the world.
A chunk of plant resin (probably fuel for fires) shows humans living on an island in eastern Indonesia at least 55,000 years ago.
However, a skull found in Greece is dated to 210,000 years ago, at a time when Europe was occupied by the Neanderthals. So, there was once a group of Early Modern Humans in Greece by 210,000.
Homo sapiens fossils from Israel have been dated to between 90,000 and 125,000 years ago. And, human fossils from China date to between 80,000 and 120,000 years ago. These groups did not survive.
Today, Central Africa still has the largest population of mobile hunter-gatherers worldwide.