My question might seem a bit naive or convoluted, but this is something i genuinely want to know. How did we as a species move from africa to the earliest settlements, like Jordan, or Israel, or like the Indegenous Australians?How did they cross these massive seas,over thousanda of years? Is this where the concept of "The Promised Land" comes from?Is this out nomadic past running through us?
Mostly, they just walked.
Deserts, oceans, and glaciated areas could be uncrossable obstacles, but it was often possible to go around them (e.g., go around deserts by following coastlines). While the distances look large on a map, they're not so formidable on a time scale of centuries - to walk from Africa to the eastern edge of Asia (e.g., to Vladivostok) in a century would only require walking and average of under 500m per day.
Note also that the last cycle of ice ages lasted from 100,000 years ago to about 10,000 years ago, and the cold spells (i.e., the actual ice ages) bound up a lot of water in glaciers, lowing sea levels. This mean that many of what are now sea barriers were dry land, allowing human settlement of many areas without needing boats (e.g., crossing from Siberia to Alaska, walking from France to Britain).
There were some parts of this spread of humans which needed boats. In particular, the settlement of Australia required boats. While most of Indonesia was dry land and connected to mainland SE Asia (due to lower sea levels during ice ages), there was still a sea gap of about 90km between Timor to Australia, or a somewhat smaller but still large gap between Sulawesi and New Guinea.
For much more detail on this, see my past answer in
Homo erectus also appears to have used boats - the first settlement of Luzon by Homo (by H. erectus rather than H. sapiens) appears to have taken place about 70,000 years ago, and would have required boats.
Is this where the concept of "The Promised Land" comes from?Is this out nomadic past running through us?
Where there are myths of migration from an ancestral homeland or migration to a "promised land", they are probably based on far more recent migrations (if based on reality, which is often but not always the case).
Note that myths of "We have always lived here" are also very common. For example, many peoples have origin myths of creation where the first humans - their mythical ancestors - were created in their current homeland.