Human Origins: Did We Begin in Africa?

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The story of modern human origins is often imagined as a simple journey out of Africa. Homir Sapiens emerging somewhere on that continent before spreading across the world and replacing other forms of human life.

But how is that story still evolving?

“Is the fall of truth of our beginnings actually much more complex?”

Of a recent decades, evidence in the form of fossils, improved dating, and ancient DNA have transformed the traditional picture, revealing a deeper, much messier tale of shifting African populations, multiple migrations, and sister species like Neanderthals. I'm Tristan Hughes. This is the ancients.

And today I'm joined once again by leading paleo anthropologist Professor Christringer to explore what the out of Africa theory really means today. Why it still matters?

And what exciting new discoveries could still be revealed about where we come from.

Chris, it is such a pleasure to see you again welcome to our new studio. Yeah, it's great to be here. It looks great. And we couldn't think of anyone better to come on the show to talk about human evolution and our story and the fact that Africa was and still is, I guess, the mothership for our species.

Yes, it still is the main place, but obviously the more we learn about some of these other places, particularly places like China, we realise that they're an important part of story too. And I guess it's as well delve into this going to be quite a sciencey chart and how the

“the out of Africa theory, it has developed a lot over the decades, hasn't it?”

Yes, I mean, since even the 1970s and early 1980s, when I and a few others were proposing this, very much in my normative view then, it was a very simple version that we had based on really slender evidence and it's developed so much now, particularly obviously with the DNA evidence, but also new fossil discoveries and new methods of dating things. And so for how long then has this idea, this proposal that, you know, homo sapiens originated

from Africa, how long has that been around? Well, I and a few other started to tentatively propose it in the early 1980s and it was based then just on the fossil evidence, but, you know, there was so much we didn't know, there was so much uncertainty that it was put forward very cautiously. And then in 1987, of course, we had the story of mitochondrial Eve appearing, which

“argued purely from recent DNA evidence, mitochondria, mitochondrial DNA inherited only through”

women, it argued that everyone in the world today could trace back their ancestry to a woman who lived in Africa, maybe 200,000 years ago. And this was based purely on data from present day humans, but it matched obviously very well with what some of us were saying, it gave an even clearer and apparently more confident picture that we had a recent African origin.

I just wanted to ask that because I've only, anyone had potentially put forward that theory before the 1970s and the 1980s, but it does sound like that was actually where it really is. Yeah, that was the beginning. In Africa, Bill Houses, the anthropologist, he had argued for quite some time before that,

that homo sapiens were so different to the other things, the other animals and so on, that we probably had a different origin and a single origin somewhere, but when he was proposing that, even in the 60s and 70s, he couldn't say where that place was, and it turned out later, of course, that it was Africa. And when talking about a recent African origin, what time period should we be thinking

Yes, well, the main exit that leads to the diversity of people today outside of Africa

“happened, genetics is estimated around 60,000 years ago, so homo sapiens having evolved”

for a long time in Africa, a small group got out of Africa and then founded the populations of the rest of the world. So that's the kind of recent out of Africa, a bit of the story, and we now know that it's more complicated than that, that there were some earlier exits of homo sapiens out of Africa that didn't end up giving rise to the populations today, and also we know that it wasn't

a pure out of Africa, you know, some of us are aware that it's virtually a hundred percent recent African origin, but now we know that other humans contributed to our ancestry, people weren't in the out of tolls, dinosaurs, which come on hopefully to talk about, they contributed a bit to our ancestry as well.

So now I use the term, which I think was first used by the Sventy Powerball, mostly out of

Africa.

“I think that's the best way of describing it for homo sapiens origins.”

And I guess also, this was something that I'm fascinating the fact that actually our story, our homo sapiens story, the majority of it, is before 60,000 years ago, so there is a lot of archaeology still to be found in Africa itself, do we think to trace that earlier story of homo sapiens? That's right, yes, the main part of the story earlier, we're only certainly an African story,

and probably a lot of our behaviour originated in Africa as well as our anatomy, and certainly most of our DNA comes from that African ancestral population.

One other big question, first of all, we say things like anatomically modern humans and

archaeo humans, what do we mean by that? Yes, those terms, I've used them a lot in the past, I'm not sure they're very good terms,

“but they're certainly wired to use, and so we better sort of go into what they mean for”

most people. So yes, our own species homo sapiens, if we look at people around the world today, yeah, we come in many different sizes and shapes and colors, but if we strip away the superficial features of the skin and hair and so on, get down to the bones and the teeth, the things that preserving fossils, there are certain shared characteristics that we can call anatomically

modern human characteristics, and so I've got an example of a replica here of a fossil from Romania that's over 40,000 years old, but here it is with a lower jaw actually from a separate individual, but they show the features of anatomically modern humans, so in the brain case, it's high and rounded, small brow ridge at the front, or maybe no brow ridge at all, quite a small face tucked under the brain case, it's quite narrow at the base and expanded higher

up, so the whole brain shape is different, and when we look at the lower jaw, we can see there's a nice chin on the front, and if we have the whole skeleton, we would see that two is distinct that there is an arrow pelvis and homo sapiens, an arrow shoulder girdle, we're much heavier, much less heavily muscled, so anatomically we've got more grass-style skeleton, if you like, we're slenderer than those earlier species, which mainly seem to be built

for strength and power in their skeletons, so those are the shared features that we can look for, there are many more of them, if we take CT scans, even inside the ear bones, we can see that the ear bones of homo sapiens are distinct from those of Neanderthals, so even these tiny little bones that we can't even physically get to except with CT scans, they're even distinct in homo sapiens them from people like Neanderthals, so that's the anatomically modern, and our cake is used as the

flip side of that, so the things that don't show those features are called archaic humans, and that would cover the Neanderthals and homo-hiderbegensis and homo-ventis, so homo erectus, they're all called archaic humans, I don't think it's a good term because of course it's a big lumping term, covering a huge amount of diversity, and actually the Neanderthals are not, in some ways they're not really archaic, they're very evolved as we are, so if we look at Neanderthal evolution,

we can see that they've all bigger brains, as we did, their teeth got smaller, as ours did, so they underwent changes too, and they're actually derived in their own direction, and as we are derived in our, in our direction, so I prefer to talk about Diorama of Neanderthals and Diorama of Thomas Sapiens, but you know, the terms are archaic amounts from modern, or still around, and yes, as a shorthand, I talk about modern humans, by which I mean, things that in the skeleton

show these sorts of features, yes, because I've either terms it like derived humans and basal humans as well, yes, and so in terms of archaic, I've tended to try and use the term basal,

they'd be closest to the base of that evolutionary tree, they show more primitive features,

so we've got an example here of a skull from Jebler Ithodium Marocca, a replica, but this one is about 300,000 years old, and I call it a basal homosapiens, so it doesn't show all the features of Antoinium on humans, it shows some of them, so for example here, the main case is still quite long and low, and there's still a strong garage, but the face, and if we had the teeth and the lower jaw, you can see there there are some homosapiens features, but they're not fully developed,

“so this, for me, would be a basal homosapiens, and this is, this is the key point, isn't it?”

A human skull from, and we'll explore Jebler Ithodium a bit more in time, homosapiens skull from 300,000

years ago, years ago, it could look very different to hunt for 100,000 years ago, and the same

in the Antoinium was early in the Antoinium compared with the late Antoinium, so that's right, yes, if we had an Ateplec, a fossil here from 400,000 years ago, from Europe, from Spain, that would show, it's what I call a basal Neanderthal, it shows some Neanderthal features, but it lacks some of the features of the late Neanderthals, for example, the brain smaller, the teeth are a bit larger, and also there's even DNA from the Ateplec fossils at 400,000,

showing that they are early members of the Neanderthal line, sadly for Jebler Ithodium, we don't have DNA, DNA, of course, in an African environment, it doesn't survive so well, so whereas we've got quite

“good early Neanderthal DNA, we don't have really any DNA of early homosapiens in Africa unfortunately,”

and all this evidence that is coming to light now, I'm guessing the more, I mean, the previous

of you, the theory that we descended from the Antitals or the Antitals came before homosapiens, that's now being very much pushed aside. Yes, so the idea that we evolved directly from Neanderthals, that was something I was testing in my PhD back in 1974, and one of the views I was testing, was this view which was a very common view, maybe the dominant view, was that yes, we evolved directly from the Neanderthals and people like them around the world, and so if we had a complete

fossil record in Africa, in Europe, we would see Neanderthals gradually changing into Europeans of today, so the brow ridges will get smaller, the teeth will get smaller, the skeleton will get more likely built, they gradually developed a chin on the lower jaw, so we'd have this sequence from Neanderthal to homosapiens, I was testing that in my PhD, and I could see no evidence for it. The Neanderthals seem to be going in their only volušnu direction as we were, so

in that PhD I could conclude that we didn't evolve from European Neanderthals, but at that stage, I couldn't say where we did evolve from that, that came later. I came later, and that's where we did out of Africa, and we'll delve into the nerdy details of the particular theories around out of Africa, but can you give us an overview right now as to what kind of the key developments

“in this theory, this hypothesis, what these key developments have been over the past few decades?”

Yeah, so if we go back to the 1980s when the ideas were really started to take off of recent African origin, there already were a few fossils from Africa that seemed to look quite modern at an early date, so there's one of the particularly from Omokhibish in Ethiopia, and I worked on that with Michael Day, and we did a reconstruction of the skull, and it showed for us modern human features, it had a small brown ridge, it was high and rounded, there was a chin on the lower jaw,

there was also a skeleton part of a skeleton to go with it, that also seemed to show recent homo sapiens features. Now back in the 1980s, it was argued by some people that it was at least a hundred thousand years old, and Michael and I accepted that dating, and therefore this was evidence of a homo sapiens existing, you know, at the same time as the Neanderthals were alive, and it was in Africa, so this pointed to an African origin, but at that time we didn't

have an ancestor for it, we didn't know where that, it was kind of isolated in a sense in Ethiopia, it certainly pointed to an African origin, but there were people saying, well, it's wrongly dated or you were overinterpreting the anatomy, there are fossils in China and elsewhere that look like homo sapiens too, and I just as old, so there was just no clear framework to really say that was the story, there was conflicting data, and it took a while for more fossils

from Africa to emerge, better dating to emerge, and for some of those other, what seemed to be anomalies in other parts of the world, got clearer with their dating, so some of those

wrongly dated, and were much more recent, so we got clarification of some of the more confusing

“bits of the story, but it really started to come together, yes, at the end of the 1980s with”

the arrival of the first bits of DNA from recent humans that started to point to it, and then, as the evidence accumulated in the 1990s and the early 2000s, we got this picture building up that we were pretty certainly, at least in my view, we looked like we were virtually 100% recent African origin, so I was interpreting the fossil data, the behavioral data, the genetic data, as all pointing to a recent African origin with homo sapiens, and one where if there had been any

interbreeding with those other forms of humans, it was minimal, so I was aware that closely related species can interbreed, and I regarded the Neanderthals as a different species, that was a view that kind of I started to pick up with a few other people in the 1980s that we went back to using the name homo Neanderthalenses for the Neanderthals, which they'd been given way back in 1864,

“then for a long time, certainly when I was doing my PhD, it was common to call the Neanderthals”

homo sapiens, they were regarded as a form of homo sapiens, so I started with a few other people to argue in the 1980s, that actually we should go back to having a separate species name for Neanderthals, and a separate species name for what became homo hydrobegances, reviving that name, but I was aware that in modern mammals, for example, you can get interbreeding between closely related species, so for example, trackers of wolves, brown bears and polar bears, a number of species of monkeys

in Africa, can hybridize, even though we regard them as different species, so I thought it could have happened between us and Neanderthals, we could have been to bred, but I thought that it wouldn't have been a normal event, it would be a rare event, and then it

happened 40,000 years ago, we're never going to find evidence of it today, of course I was wrong about that,

“because in 2010 we got the first reconstruction of a good quality Neanderthal genome, that was published”

in journal science, and it showed that indeed people outside of Africa have around 2% Neanderthal DNA in their genomes, and that's because there was an interbreeding event, maybe 50,000 years ago, so homo sapiens came out of Africa in this exit, maybe 60,000 years ago, soon after that, they met some Neanderthals, they did some interbreeding with them, and then as they spread around the rest of the world, they took that bit of Neanderthal with them, so not only is there around 2%

Neanderthal in people in Europe, but it's there in China, it's there in Australia, it's there in Native Americans, so everyone outside of Africa has this Neanderthal component, so we have this kind of paradoxical situation that we did not evolve from Neanderthals, which is what I was testing my PhD, but they're partly our ancestors, because we've caught Neanderthal DNA, so it's kind of, you know, there they're distinctly in each evolving for a very long period of time, hundreds of thousands of years,

but not evolving to such an extent, they couldn't still be a bit of interbreeding, and not evolving in Africa alongside ourselves until we got, so it was also further evidence for the African origin, so it sounds like it's, it's this combination of, it's improved dating over time, there's a discovery of some really remarkable new fossils, and of course the introduction of DNA,

and the building up of this incredible DNA database, all of that combined as well,

explore, helps make it, you know, why an academic circle was especially this recent African origin is so persuasive today. Yes, I mean for me it's persuasive, of course there are still people who argue that it's still an over interpretation of the data, that actually the picture is much more complicated, that we should acknowledge these contributions from populations in the rest of the world, as being more significant. So we have models like the braided stream model,

which says that the evolution of our species is more like a river, which has many different tributaries that separate off, but then they come together emerge, and this pattern's been going on

for the whole of the evolution of homo sapiens, probably been going on for one and a half million years,

and that really there's no point in having these separate species names, because there was a bit of interbreeding going on between many of these different branches that we should call everything homo sapiens. So it kind of goes back to that view that was around in the 70s and 80s, that actually let's call everything homo sapiens that's essentially genus homo. So even to homo erectors back that far, to one and a half, even close to two million years, people argue that we

we really shouldn't call that a separate species, even that should be called homo sapiens. Now for me,

fossil fishers and fossil reptiles and so on, and the methods they use to establish species in

“the fossil record are similar to the ones I use to establish fossils in the fossil human record,”

and the level of difference between us and the antitols. Certainly my view and the view of many of them is at the level which in any other animal would be called distinct species. So I still regard them as distinct species, even though we know there was a bit of interest. But you know, you know, I'm not sort of wedded absolutely to the idea, but it seems to me that if you call all of those things homo sapiens, you really lose any meaning to the term because, you know,

how do we describe what is a homo sapiens? Well, is it got a big brain? Well, not really because the erectors ones are very small brain, small teeth. Well, not really because the only ones who got big teeth and disciplines who got big teeth, um, like a brow ridge is well, no, there's brow ridge is in most of them. So even to say, what is the brain size? What is the brain size of homo sapiens? Well, it's everything from down 30 to the size of a gorilla up to the huge size

“of an antelus. So the term homo sapiens become meaningless more philosophically. I think if you have”

this very wide definition, gosh, all that we're getting deep into those those theories are ready. I'll meet Chris and we won't go into the weeds of what is a species today because I know that it was also, that's another episode in its own right. Um, if I, if you may allow me to ask a superlative question because we have all this different evidence today, but I've been any landmarked discoveries that we can say is the strongest evidence that we have today for evidence

of an African origin for our species. Well, I think it has to be the genetic data. As you know, which is not a single thing, of course, it's a massive data that keeps building up, you know,

tens and tens of thousands of genomes and all of them show that first of all, if we partition

variation in homo sapiens today by far the greatest part of it is in Africa. Um, and there are deep villages there and if we look at the variation of people outside of Africa, it's a tiny subset of that whole variation that we find. So just the pure fact of this, you know, huge diversity in Africa and all of the rest of us being a tiny subsomple out of that diversity really does point to a recent African origin and that's true for the wide chromosome, male inherited for the mitochondria,

“female inherited and for the whole genome. So overall, I think genetic data are the strongest,”

but we now have a number of other fossils, not just homo kibish, but there's other forces in Ethiopia, such as from Hoto, we've got evidence from southern Africa from sites like classes, river mouth. Um, so and we've got the staff as we mentioned from Jebel Irmuroco and later, Moroccan fossils that all point to the existence of homo sapiens features and a much earlier day in Africa than we find the many or else. So Chris, let's explore some of these fossil discoveries

and let's touch on the one for which you have a replica and you brought it up just a bit earlier, which is Jebel Irchord. So can you set the scene of where this is what we should be thinking with Jebel

Irchord? Hmm. Yeah, so yeah, this is a replica of the first fossil that was found. So,

yeah, this was found before I done my PhD, it was called an African Neanderthal when it was discovered around 1960. So it's from a quarry, a working quarry in North East Africa and Morocco, a new West Africa, in North Africa, in North Africa. So there's a quarry there and in that quarry were sort of cave deposits within the quarry and a number of fossils were found there and this is one of the most complete ones that's been found. Was there an accidental discovery? Yes, they were

working there. It was an accidental discovery, so this was a commercial quarry and these bones were being found. We don't know if any were found before that that were lost but there were. So I'm rocking scientists, did conduct some excavations there when bones were showing up and this turned up and as I say it was regarded by many people as being an African Neanderthal and originally dated only about 40,000 years old. So when I did my PhD, I was lucky enough to be able to measure this when

it was in Paris before I went back to Morocco and I could see straight away that it wasn't an handle toll because by then I'd seen a number of Neanderthal fossils in my trip around Europe in 1971 and the face on its own was unlike any Neanderthal face. It was like a slightly bigger version of our own face. So for me this certainly didn't look like a Neanderthal but at 40,000 years old it was also too primitive to be an ancestor for homo sapiens. So that time it didn't seem to be

in a remote area, peripheral air like Morocco but a team went back to the site in from about 2015 onwards and did new excavations and they recovered more material, more fossils, more stone tools, more animal bones and they did much improved dating work and that showed that these Jebilihood fossils and by then there were a number of different skulls and teeth and jaw bones these were actually about 300,000 years old and the stone tools were a very nice example

of early Middle Stone Age tools. So at 300,000 years suddenly this was back in the scene as an

“important fossil because it did show, although primitive it did show some sapiens features and so”

what do mean by early Middle Stone Age tool? Yes we've got these stages of the Stone Age which archaeologists have set up and in Africa we've got the early Stone Age the Middle Stone Age and the later Stone Age. So the Middle Stone Age in Africa is equivalent to also the Middle Paleolithic that's another term, lower Paleolithic, Middle Paleolithic, upper Paleolithic, Paleolithic being old Stone Age Stone Age. So we've got these stages of the Stone Age and in

Africa the Middle Stone Age is the stage that's associated with the beginnings of homo sapiens things like Jebilihood and the equivalent stage in Europe and Asia is associated with the Neanderthals. So yeah so we saw about those technical studies. But yes the fact that it was associated with Middle Stone Age tools also showed complex behaviour, these are very nice you may tools so it suggested that again this was not a backward population in a peripheral era of

“Africa it showed that Morocco was important in the story of our origins and more work is being”

done there down to the present day I mean in all of a sudden you know in recent years you know redating that is now one of if not the oldest evidence of homo sapiens we have from Africa and more to come hopefully. Yes I mean it's I don't think this can be the oldest evidence of homo sapiens because work I've been doing with Chinese scientists on fossils from China suggest that the roots of the Chinese population that we know as

dissidents also known as homo longi dragonman that lineage seems to go back at least a million

years as a separate lineage and if that's correct that also implies that our lineage and the Neanderthal lineage had split off and that means our lineage and the Neanderthal lineage must also

“go back at least a million years to the tour common ancestor so if that's true then”

it would in fact is actually a relatively young homo sapiens compared with ones that would be at the beginning of that evolution so this is still very controversial the genetic data suggests that we had a common ancestor with Neanderthals and Denisovans

maybe 700,000 years ago we would suggest on some of the fossil data it could be at least a million

so this is ongoing work but it certainly pushes back the ancestry further even on genetic data and that means that generally Hoodies by no means the oldest homo sapiens there must be some older ones either we've already got them and we can't recognise them or they haven't yet been found well that's the thing that's the exciting thing could there be almost a million years of story still to learn about from Africa in the store absolutely I mean there must be a

deep history then for sapiens to be uncovered in Africa and equally exciting really there must be a deep history for Neanderthals to be recovered outside of Africa probably and a deep history for the Denisovans and the homo Longi lineage that's beginning to be uncovered in China I've heard you will be able to see your mobile phone but not so easily come from here as well as with your ex ex

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and then potentially I guess the next question would be more evidence of early adventures out of Africa by earlier by as you use the terminate more basalt homer sapiens that we know don't know much about you as of yet yes that's right so of course the implication will be that is it really only one very late exit form of sapiens or could there be early ones and yes we do seem to have evidence of early exits so I was involved in studying a fossil from a cave site in Greece called

a pedemic cave and a few years back we published evidence that from that site there's the back

of a skull which had been considered to be neanderthal but on our analyses it actually looked like the back of a homer sapiens skull and the date he gave it in suggests that it's at least 210,000 years

“old and what's intriguing is that after that fossil is in the site we also have a proper neanderthal”

fossil at the site maybe 30 or 40,000 years younger the neanderthals over there and whatever evidence that was of early homer sapiens were disappeared so the neanderthals came back and that early homer sapiens population if it was there as disappeared now not everyone accepts that this isn't early homer sapiens and we have to be cautious is only the back of a skull what was the rest of it like but on that evidence it certainly looks like they could have been an early homer sapiens dispersal and that

actually ties up with some genetic data because there's quite an intriguing pattern when we look at neanderthal and homer sapiens DNA I mentioned that we have a separation time maybe of 700,000 years for us and the neanderthals based on the whole genome but when you look at the mitochondrial DNA

“of us in neanderthals that's in heretic through females when we look at the white chromosomes”

of us in neanderthals in heretic through miles they have a younger ancestry a younger common ancestry maybe only half the age of what whole genome would say maybe 350,000 now that's very strange and so geneticists have proposed that there must have been an early exit or homer sapiens out of Africa maybe 300, 400,000 years ago there was some interbreeding with the neanderthals and yes that put a little bit of homer sapiens DNA into their genome but also it replaced their own

mitochondrial and white chromosome with a more homer sapiens like from a more basal homer sapiens will be basal homer sapiens getting out of Africa meeting the alitholes do a bit of interbreeding

and changing basically that replacing their mitochondria and white chromosome with a more homer sapiens

like pattern which is why they have a younger divergence on mitochondria and why from us then they do on the whole genome so it's a complicated story but the epidimophosal might match that by showing us that they were indeed homer sapiens in some or like Greece more than 200,000 years ago and there's also evidence of earlier exits which we can pick up in China and even Australia because there are fossils in China that look sapiens like and in Southeast Asia that look sapiens like

that are well over 60,000 years old so I've mentioned you know the geneticists estimate the main exit was 60,000 years onwards that gave rise to populations outside of Africa today but the fact that you've got fossils in China in Sumatra for example in Laos that are probably 17, 80,000 years old means they predate that 60,000 exits so there must have been earlier exits and there's controversial evidence from Australia too so a site called Magia Bebe II in northern Australia

it's got a very deep sequence and you know beautifully stratified layers and at about 65,000 years ago when we're dating from the sandy posits there's a layer that has complex technology a lot of use of pigments and dated at 65,000 again before the 60,000 exits supposedly and we assume that's homo sapiens because of the complexity of the Bebeavia because some people say we don't have fossils but that would suggest there was even an early sapiens arrived

in Australia at least 65,000 years ago so these earlier exits seem to have happened but they didn't take hold in the same way either those populations died out as seems to have happened in Europe

ended up being in larger numbers and it's actually over-printed any signal of those earlier

“populations that were there a lot of those days there's still being pushback Australia's”

good example as well as that now we've kind of explained all of that and looked at some discoveries and not the importance of DNA I hope you don't mind if we now kind of delve into the theories themselves in regards to out of Africa and because it's all well and good saying oh they spread out from here and went there and there and there but what we actually mean by that there's a lot of debate and lots of different theories on that yes I mean you know I've already shown

my own views of Outer Africa have changed really since those very early simple models things are more complicated the evidence of interbreeding makes things more complicated so yes we could say that you've got the the strict recent African orange in model and that's the model which the mitochondrial DNA seems to suggest that really we can talk about almost a pure out of Africa so homo sapiens evolved in Africa pretty much entirely came out of Africa

and replaced completely all those other populations and that is just the traditional of the Plano it's simple recent African origin that's the model if you like the one extreme version of

a recent African origin and I was always I was never really wedded to that idea although the

mitochondria suggested it I was always aware that there could have been a bit of interbreeding but again I thought that would be trivial in the big picture so we were effectively a hundred percent recent African origin even though there might have been some interbreeding okay then people like Gunter Breuer proposed a model called recent African origin and hybridisation so he went yeah that's right he proposed that from the end of the 70s into the 80s and we

worked together on publications and papers with that model as well and so he argued that yes it was mostly a recent African origin but there was some interbreeding on a maybe a bigger scale than I was arguing but we could therefore expect to find some fossils that might show evidence

“of any adult features but again in the big picture this would not be very important and I think”

Gunter's model is probably closest to what we've ended up with with the interbreeding evidence it's recent African origin and hybridisation and hybridisation because we're talking about interbreeding between you know what I recall as different species so you know there will be

these species coming together even though the revolutionary separate and I mentioned really that

this is something that we know happens quite commonly in mammals or birds some are estimated that 16 percent of birds species today have hybridisation with neighbouring species so it's not as though this is a rare event genetic data it shows it's actually a very common event and so that seems to have happened in our ancestry then there was a model called the assimilation model and this was proposed by people like Fred Smith and Eric Trinkhaus again in the in the late

70s and early 80s and they were proposing that yes there was an African origin for homo sapiens but it was a much more gradual and diffuse process so basically Africa dominated the picture because of a larger population so Africa in a sense was pumping out these genes of more derived homo sapiens features and these were then being assimilated in well the populations outside of Africa so in the end of times we're picking up those bits of DNA and becoming more sapiens like

and over in the far east populations we're picking up those sapiens like genes that were coming out of Africa and we're being picked up by populations there so those populations outside of Africa will gradually transform with this mixing of DNA into homo sapiens so it's a kind of blend of an African origin and regional continuity so you've got kind of both side by side so

“it means Africa's important but not as important as the recent African origin hybridization model”

or the real single origin model would propose that's three third model three and then we've got

the classic multi-regional model which argues that basically you've got ancestral populations for homo sapiens all over the place where well everywhere that genus homo lived and evolved they evolved towards homo sapiens so the Neanderthals were evolving to homo sapiens in Europe we have populations in China evolving to homo sapiens there populations in Java and in an easier and revolving from what we would traditionally call homo erectus into recent populations

in Australia and in Africa of course there's also a transition from early homo populations

there's not speciation they're not going their separate ways because gene flow is keeping them together so gene flow acts like a kind of glue holding them together populations in Africa are integrated with ones in western Asia who are then integrated with populations in Europe and over in the

forest and so there's never enough genetic separation for speciation and it's essentially the

evolution of one species homo sapiens over one and a half million years yeah those are the four traditional yes those are the four traditional models and there's also the braided stream model yes I've got this as well so these are these are newer models that are emerging it's yes it's a

“newer name I think it essentially it's the multi-regional model really under another name so for”

me it's very difficult to separate it from well probably the assimilation model and the and the classic multi-regional model braided stream is really like both of those so it's suggesting that you've got continuity over most of the inhabited world it doesn't get in so much to those tricky issues of species but it argues that essentially there is no single place where homo sapiens evolved and what I've said is well if it is a braided stream then it's a braided

stream out of Africa so the braided stream the main but a father main flow is coming from Africa and yes there are all these subsidiary channels which pick up some DNA from these other populations but Africa is still the dominant part of the story and lastly the African population structure model yes so I've been involved with people like and Ellen a Sherry in developing that model and she's really developed this into what you can call a pan African model so the idea is that

homo sapiens did not evolve in one place so back in the 70s and 80s with fostered like

“homo kipish we were arguing some of us that East Africa was going to be very important in homo sapiens”

origins maybe the most important maybe the single center where it happened the birthplace the

birthplace of homo sapiens would be an East Africa other people I'll give that it could be South Africa so there's different ideas about where homo sapiens originated and the problem is that of course these models were built on where you had the best fossil evidence which of course may not be where it was all happening and people have compared this with you know the drunk guy who's looking for his car keys and you know it's night time and he's lost his car keys and he goes and

looks under the street like because that's where the light is but in fact his car keys are somewhere always in the dark so it could be that that's our situation that of course we look at the areas where there's the best evidence of homo sapiens origins and that could include Moroccan now

“but what Ellie argued and some of the rest of us joined in on that was that actually there were”

probably a number of parts of Africa that contributed to our origins so homo sapiens early homo sapiens populations were widespread in Africa they were in Morocco certainly they were Ethiopia they were Central Africa they were down in South Africa and these populations when they were separated by climate change so for example the spread of deserts at times may have pinned them back and separated them and they went their own way in evolution but at other times when climate's improved and

there was more rainfall these populations spread into newly greened areas met each other exchange genes exchanged ideas so we get a much more complex network a braided stream if you're like but just in Africa where homo sapiens is evolving as a composite of these different populations that finally come together maybe a hundred thousand years ago to become the homo sapiens that then spreads across the whole world so the combining of these populations I said that seems to

happen very late in the story of homo sapiens then in their development from what you were saying earlier that's right yes so this is a complex picture that goes on for hundreds of thousands of years and we only get a kind of coalescence to homo sapiens pattern both in anatomy and behaviour that comes together maybe a hundred thousand years ago also and then emerges from Africa and stays behind in Africa as well and there are some even more complex models which are kind of

there as an undercurrent that a number of geneticists are saying well even these models are too simple and actually there is evidence that there's a very deep split in the evolution of homo sapiens

that might go back one and a half million years in Africa and this is an astonishing model

it all gives that they could have been basically there was one ancestral population maybe one and a half million years ago in Africa it then split into two distinct lineages which then evolved along side each other one of them then gave rise to Neanderthals and genicivans and later on

second lineage is evolving alongside them for a million years and maybe three hundred thousand

“years ago it into breeds with the homo sapiens that are in Africa and then produces the final push”

to make homo sapiens as we know it and automatically and it's probably more of homo sapiens and that population then disappears conveniently so it's an incredible story but there are several geneticists now arguing for these kinds of complex models so if that's correct it's even difficult to decide where homo sapiens starts is it one and a half million years ago is it when you get that into breeding event maybe 300 thousand years ago so this these are newly emerging models and

it's going to take a while for them to be integrated and also for the fossil evidence to be put together with them but you know if they're correct then it might bring something like our old friend homo hide of the genesis back into the picture so I mean first of all Chris before going to that it sounds as if then like that that theory then us today was it not based on what's the word derived or anatomically modern homo sapiens we're you know from that converging we're almost like

a blend of different basal homo sapiens groups coming together which I'm getting my head around now yeah I mean we're all having to get a head around it and of course these are models they're they're based some of them on modern genetic data purely some of them doing corporate ancient DNA

but the revolutionary models of course in the the depth that they argue for our origins and

something like homo hide of against is so this is a replica of the skull from cabway broken hill in Zambia and we can now date it at about 300 thousand years old and it's you know certainly not an anatomically modern human we've got a massive brown age a long low-scale angle angled at the back rather like homo erectus quite a large brain though that's a modern size brain in there but a big face so this is part of what I've called homo hide of against

this is a species that was widespread it was a Europe it was an Africa probably almost certainly an Asia as well and I used to argue that it was probably the common ancestor for us and now to toes at that time many people dated this skull at 500 thousand years and that seemed a reasonable date

“from which we could go to homo sapiens and neanderthals from something like this that's what I”

used to think but of course as we've found other fossils as we've got younger dating for this fossil of 300 thousand and that means it's about the same age as jibbleyhood and it's much less sapiens right than jibbleyhood so I then said well actually I got that wrong highly against it's not our common ancestor it's a side branch that died out but these basil deep split models that I'm talking about from the genetic data um they argue that they could have been a

lineage alongside homo sapiens in Africa for maybe a million years that then into bread with homo sapiens

about 300 thousand years ago and they disappeared well hide of against this might come into the picture back into the picture as being that other lineage that co-existed with this evolving sapiens lineage in which case even this could be part of our ancestry too I was about to ask could this actually be a basil homo sapiens well it doesn't too far I mean it doesn't look like homo sapiens so I would have trouble calling it a homo sapiens for me it's a distinct species but it

was suggest that there was an interbreeding event which put in maybe 20% DNA into the evolving homo sapiens and it's so a much higher level than has been talked about for the neanderthals and denessivants so it would be a significant part of our ancestry but again in my view we wouldn't

“have evolved from highly-begancy's but it would be part of our ancestry and important part of our ancestry”

if those models are correct but I stress that there newly emerging models and we're all looking at how they can work and that only by the testing of course I'm sure you will have a mobile phone but not so easily come from here as well as with a xxl streaming I'm not sure if you're going to have a mobile phone in real life with a mobile phone in real life with a friend from the beginning of an unimindest contract on time, for 10 euro in monad, Frank, no, Frank. Well look no further than the award winning after dark myths, misdeeds and the paranormal with me,

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Chris, let's get you on every couple of years because it always seems that more complex things are coming out

and more complex models, I mean of course it's an exciting time with all these different ideas coming through but it's very difficult to give an overview, a simpler view certainly that the experts are confused now as much as everyone else is. I was going my head around first of all that they're not being this idea of one birthplace but then the same time is saying that there are several different birthplaces I'm going to say Pianz also a bit misleading at the same time. Yes I mean Africa is still the dominant

place in our in our story but of course which parts of Africa I mean if if this story is correct of these two deep separate separate images for a million years we've got to ask so how could these

“images remain separate for a million years in somewhere like Africa what was keeping them apart?”

Did they live in complete different areas? Were they in some way different behavior

that they didn't actually interbreve much until this last interbreeding phase at around 300,000? We've covered a lot about the homosepins to and how complicated it is now for before the main Exodus migration out of Africa itself but if we focus on that 60,000 years ago how easy would it have been for homosepins to leave Africa? Yeah I mean that's a good question because we we don't know the precise date of exit we think it was a small group for people or maybe a successive

small groups of people but close in time and we don't know what the climatic conditions were at that time because we don't have a society dated so at times we know that that region,

“Northeastern Africa and the Levant at times it was relatively arid at times it was”

we're watered with more rainfall so we guess that it was probably a time when the climate improved

and that allowed homosepins to move into the region and because they would have been following their food so if there was an expansion of grasslands and even sort of woodlands and an expansion of the animals that are feeding on that new you know expansion then the humans are going to follow because that's where their food is so it may be that these people were just following their food in coming out of Africa and you know of course for them well Africa you know they

didn't know they were leaving Africa they were going into a new area and that then was the beginning of that out of Africa expansion there are some people who think that it might have been more a four stecks it that perhaps there was a tiereration of climate in Northeastern Africa and these populations were pushed out and that would explain in large numbers yeah they go in trying to find a new area so yes so we're not sure if it was push or pull

will they push out into Western Asia or will they pull out into Western Asia by improved conditions and in regards to the roots that they would have taken back then should we just be thinking of Arabia and the Levant you know Syria Palestine is relevant today that that area or could they potentially those in Morocco at the streets of Gibraltar have made that short crossing to southern Spain well Gibraltar and southern Spain today as well yeah so in terms of the

the western route via you know the streets of Gibraltar some people do believe that there were crossings early crossing so there are stone tools on an island off the coast of Morocco that looked down to toll like but of course we don't have the forces to show any of the doors with there so most of the evidence and this includes evidence of the of the large mammals as well suggests that there were not any early crossings across there of populations in either direction

but from North Africa to Europe or Europe to North Africa and that those crossings came much later you know the waters there are actually quite dangerous very strong currents through there and so and of course even if a small population got across you know it may not have survived so the majority opinion is that we didn't have early crossings on the western side and that yes it's over in northeastern Africa some people think that there could have been crossings

at the southern end of the Red Sea where it's very narrow and it would have been a crossing

so perhaps there were crossings down there but again majority opinion is that it would have been

“further north through the cyanide and into you know the main parts of western Asia”

okay well let's go to China and let's go peaking man which is a guess this we can we can use this skull a little bit for yes how does peaking man and and explain what peaking man is as well if you don't mind I've got a skull in front of me yes um how this story potentially fits into the kind of the recent African origin or people used to think it it hmm yeah so this is an example of

course of homo erectus one of the classic homo erectus populations from China so these finds began to be made at Djogudian near Beijing in the late 1920s and in the 1930s there were controlled excavations there that recovered a wonderful suite of fossils that was similar to one's known from Java and what we now call homo erectus so these populations were in the Beijing area about 500,000 years ago and for people who believed in regional continuity the multi-regional

model these were going to be the ancestors of modern East Asian populations for example the modern Chinese and people argue that you can see features in these fossils that come through to modern populations in East Asia today for example having a particularly shape of the insider teeth a relative lack of wisdom teeth third molars these were features that were thought to be there in peaking man as these fossils became known and that can be found in modern Chinese

populations at a higher frequency so that was the continuity idea of course the recent African origin would suggest that there is no continuity with the renters there is continuity with Denisovans who are a lineage that we think evolved alongside erectus so in China we have the continuation of homo erectus down to maybe three or 400 thousand years ago so therefore over a

million years but also alongside them we've got the evolution of homo longi dragonman we've got this

replica over there green color replica is the home in cranium which we think is so it's the type specimen of homo longi dragonman but also pretty certainly a Denisovans so that lineage was in China as well evolving and the erectus lineage died out the Denisovans continued from much longer into bread with homo sapiens and then they died out too so it's this idea that you know once thought that this meant that it would kind of contrasted with the recent African origin theory but more recently

with the discovery of the Denisovans and so on actually this has been largely to banks now to do with it. Well there are some people in China who are still wedded to the idea that

“out of these fossils are important in the ancestry of modern Chinese people so there are some”

political factors in there as well which are influencing those views and of course it's it's possible there is a little bit of DNA even because there is evidence that there was our cake integration from a very early population into the Denisovans so possibly erectus or in fact almost certainly there's evidence that erectus into bread with Denisovans and then Denisovans into bread with homo sapiens so there could be some transmission via the Denisovans of erectus DNA

into homo sapiens today in the Far East so they couldn't even be a little bit very enough never

say never recent Asian origin recently it's it's it's it's so interesting I guess actually it's but it's going to be a very small amount of DNA but it could be there at a very small level and Chris like what do you think is the best one sentence answer to homo sapiens origins today? I would say that we are mostly out of Africa mostly out of Africa that summarizes it

“for me I think that's quite nice isn't it as well you brilliantly detailed all those that”

they're complicated how it's getting more and more complicated they're thinking about our story before we leave Africa multiple birth places converging populations to form anatomically modern homo sapiens and you discover it's coming out it seems like there's still so much we don't know and why it's still so exciting but bound to get even more complicated in a year's ahead absolutely I mean just think

happening since I did my PhD just how much has happened it's incredible how much I know

it's just growing and yes in some ways it gets more complicated in other ways it gets simpler because along the way we can dispense with the incorrect ideas you know as we have new dating we can dispense with the confusion that was created by bad dating where we get

it's a more complicated story I would say it's a richer story it's a more honest story of our

“origins and I think what it shows is that actually homo sapiens origins in my view is not”

something special if we had this degree of information about the evolution of let's say lions

or pandas or krainas they would be similarly rich if we ever have the evidence of

guerrilla and chimpanzee evolution which we mostly lack they would have their own rich

“stories to tell as well so I think this is showing us the way forward that you know when you”

get more data yes it's a complex story it's a richer story and it isn't just our story all of

these other species had their own wonderful origin stories to tell and we shouldn't forget them

“and of course that's true for the pound of towels for the denizens for hider begins is all”

them have their own rich evolutionary history that we're only beginning to tell Chris you are one of if not the leading expert on human evolution and early homo sapiens in the developing story and the answer was we'll have to get you back on as well in the future it just goes me to say thank you so much for taking the time to come back on the show it's been a pleasure again thanks so much for joining us on the ancients today i hope you enjoyed the episode and if you are

loving the ancients then why not become a history hit subscribe a as a subscribe you will have access to hundreds of hours of original documentaries within you release every week plus early access and add three podcasts you can sign up at history hit dot com slash subscribe see you in the next episode [BLANK_AUDIO]