It all used to be so simple. The story of how we – that is Homo sapiens, today’s humans – emerged from Africa and spread across what’s become Europe and Asia was a neat, straightforward narrative.
It began around 50,000 years ago when our brains experienced a lightbulb moment of advancing cognition and creativity, stimulating our ancestors to journey beyond our cradle continent.
When they reached Eurasia, around 40–30,000 years ago, they encountered another group of humans, a distinct type we now refer to as Neanderthals.
Shortly after that, the Neanderthals disappeared and we, H. sapiens, stood alone in their place, monarchs of a planet devoid of competitors.
This ‘Out of Africa’ story allowed us to frame ourselves as the successful colonisers, the evolutionary winners, the masters of the planet. But the past few decades of archaeological developments have shown us that it probably didn’t happen like that.
We still believe, based on current fossil and DNA evidence, that Africa was where our species first emerged, before spreading farther afield. Almost everything else, however, has changed.
Today, we’re looking at a chronicle of human evolution that’s a lot less simple, but far more interesting.
This new perspective is one where Earth was, until recently, considerably more crowded with hominin relations than we imagined – a place where our species wandered more widely, and earlier, than previously thought, and now looks more like an accidental survivor than pre-destined conqueror.
Discovering familiar, but unknown, relatives
To understand all this, it helps to go back a bit. By the mid-20th century, a hundred years of astonishing discoveries and scientific study had recast the place of humans in nature.
Rather than something entirely distinct from other animals, we seemed instead to be the result of an extended evolutionary experiment.
This recasting began with the placing of Neanderthals in our genus Homo, after the first remains were found in Germany in 1856, forcing us to recognise unknown-yet-familiar relations.
Then, in the 1890s, came Homo erectus, a much more ‘primitive’-looking relative found in East Asia. They were followed by Homo heidelbergensis in Europe and, by the 1920s, the first of the diminutive, more chimpanzee-like australopithecines from Africa.
The early 1930s saw Neanderthals identified in the Levant region of the eastern Mediterranean, at Tabun Cave (within then-British Mandatory Palestine).
While at a site called Skhūl in the same region, around the same age, there were skeletons that looked much more like H. sapiens, even though their stone tools were virtually identical to those of Neanderthals.
With no means to date such discoveries (radiometric methods wouldn’t emerge until the 1950s), contrasting theories to explain the Skhūl findings began to swirl.
Was this evidence for a single, contemporary yet highly variable population; some kind of regional branching; or even interbreeding? Only one thing was clear: the story of H. sapiens was more of a puzzle than we first thought.
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Humanity's longer, more complicated history
Further pieces of the puzzle were unearthed towards the end of 20th century and during the start of the 21st.
The 1990s saw a skull similar to the Skhūl remains, but dating to around 150,000 years ago, found in Ethiopia’s Herto study area, and the past 15 years have seen fossils twice that age excavated from Jebel Irhoud, Morocco.
By integrating these with other remains from 350–100,000 years ago, a new vision of the emergence of H. sapiens has developed.
While past debates focused on whether we evolved in East or South Africa, a new model proposes that H. sapiens didn’t have a single ‘homeland’.
Instead, we gradually evolved from diverse roots within a large ‘meta-population’ that extended across much of the continent, and within which distinctive traits like our globe-shaped skulls developed.
This move towards a ‘slow-cook’ materialisation of our species in Africa between 350-200,000 years ago happened alongside a lengthy accretion of discoveries of H. sapiens in Eurasia. With each new find, researchers reconfigured their understandings.
Evidence for an early H. sapiens presence in the Levant began to grow in the 1970s. Archaeologists had returned to a site in Israel originally excavated in the 1930s, named Qafzeh, and found skeletons, but also clear signs of burial rituals involving pierced shells and pigments.
At that time, the idea that the Qafzeh and Skhūl sites might not be much older than about 40,000 years was uncontroversial.
But when pioneering dating methods that could be used on materials older than radiocarbon dating (which has a limit of around 55,000 years) were applied, it turned out that the Qafzeh bones dated back to around 90,000 years ago.
The Skhūl remains were yet older still, well beyond 100,000 years. Their location in the most obvious pathway out of Africa meant that the antiquity of humans in Eurasia had effectively doubled.
Yet without other similarly ancient H. sapiens sites on the continent, these finds were largely viewed as evidence of a temporary excursion from Africa, rather than a colonisation by a different species. And however prevalent H. sapiens may have been in the area at that time, they were soon replaced by Neanderthals.
Fast-forward to the present, however, and the Skhūl and Qafzeh findings now look less like anomalies and more like one act in a much longer drama of hominin population dispersals going back 2 million years (see ‘The first explorers’, below).
Even more surprising, almost none of these early advances into Eurasia seem to have led to permanent settlement or a genetic legacy in living humans.
Evidence of early humans in Asia and beyond
While much attention has focused on Africa, Europe and the Levant, the potential for an ancient presence of H. sapiens farther east into Asia and beyond has also begun to accumulate.
The Lake Mungo site, in Australia, has a reputation for smashing expectations concerning the antiquity of human presence on that continent.
When it was found in the 1960s, it was expected to date no further back than 20,000 years, aligning with the belief that the major expansion of H. sapiens into Eurasia only happened around 10,000 years earlier.
Yet this was shown to be a huge underestimation: dating for the male ‘Mungo 3’ skeleton is around 45–40,000 years ago.
This information, coming in the early 2000s, seemed to establish an extremely rapid movement of H. sapiens across Eurasia and was further reinforced when archaeological remains from the Madjedbebe rock shelter, in Australia’s Northern Territory, were dated to 65–55,000 years ago.
Where did those early Australians come from? At least one East Eurasian hominin contemporary of Neanderthals has been identified – the Denisovans – but tracing the presence of early H. sapiens in this region is tricky.
The implications from Australia are that north-western Sahul (the ancient landmass that connected Papua New Guinea, Australia and Tasmania when sea levels were low enough) must have been reached well before 50,000 years ago.
But East Asia is a vast area where researchers are still working to establish solid anatomical identifications and dating for a number of hominin remains.
At present, there are claims of remains from Lida Ajer in Sumatra (dating back to around 73–63,000 years ago) and Tam Pà Ling in Northern Laos (dating back to around 77–50,000 years ago).
China also appears to possess a number of sites containing H. sapiens-like bones ranging from 120–70,000 years old, but many uncertainties exist.
In 2018, a fragment of finger found in Saudi Arabia pointed to H. sapiens being present there around 90–86,000 years ago.
The discovery hints that early movements beyond Africa flowed through more than one route: landwards through the Levant, but also along coastal paths around the Persian Gulf.
We have no DNA for any H. sapiens remains dating beyond 50,000 years ago, however, meaning it’s difficult to determine how all those ancient populations relate to each other.
Complicating things further is the fact that even older H. sapiens fossils keep being found. A bone from the Misliya Cave, in Israel, has been dated to around 180,000 years ago, while a skull cemented into rubble inside a fissure in Greece’s Apidima Cave dates back over 210,000 years.
These remains are astonishingly old and most researchers interpret them as clues that more than one dispersal of H. sapiens occurred.
The first explorers
Along with new insights into early Homo sapiens dispersals from Africa, our understanding of who the earliest Eurasian hominins were and when they lived has also shifted.
The 2022 discovery of facial fragments of skull from Sima del Elefante, in Spain, put hominins in Western Europe extremely early.
The exact date is yet to be established, but it’s very old – it was found 1.2m (4ft) below another fossil from a different species (Homo antecessor) dated to 1.2 million years ago.
Researchers classed the face as ‘Homo affinis erectus’, recognising that it resembles, but isn’t identical to, known examples of this ancient and widespread population, itself found in East Asia by around 1.7 million years ago.
All this, together with yet another distinctive fossil population from Dmanisi, Georgia, dating to 1.7 million years ago, and stone tools from geological deposits in China that may be more than 2 million years old, makes it undeniable that there’s a deep and dynamic history of hominin dispersals well before H. sapiens evolved.
Ripples before the wave of H. sapiens
But for the time period after 70,000 years ago, we’re beginning to discern details.
Most significantly, genetics from early H. sapiens remains, combined with those from living humans, tell us that everyone today with ancestry from outside Africa descends from a population that likely dispersed between 60–50,000 years ago.
Some hints in the DNA might indicate another, slightly older dispersal before 70,000 years ago, but if so, it contributed only a tiny amount to the ancestors of Australasians.
But the idea that there were perhaps many ‘ripples’ before the wave of H. sapiens remains important and this is where the latest findings have been crucial.
None of the individuals from the five sites where we’ve recovered DNA and which date to before 40,000 years ago were directly ancestral to us (they contributed little or no genetic legacy to people today).
In a strictly biological sense, these were ‘failed colonisations’, overturning simplistic narratives of our evolutionary dominance where humans simply needed to move into a given area in order to permanently settle it.
Getting hot and heavy with other hominins
Something else surprising that’s become increasingly important in the past 20 years is the fact that reproductive contact between hominin species (‘admixture’) appears to have been rather common.
Current data points to a number of periods where early H. sapiens moving outwards from Africa from 180,000 (if not before 200,000) years ago encountered other kinds of hominins who had been living in Eurasia for thousands of generations already and, in some cases, forged intimate relations with them.
The evidence for the earliest phases is less clear and relies on signals deep within the genomes of those other species, including Neanderthals.
But whenever we study early Eurasian H. sapiens’ genetic information from between 50–40,000 years ago, we find there’s already some ancestry from Neanderthals or Denisovans. In some cases, more than one phase.
The earliest so far was found in closely related individuals from the German site of Ranis and Zlatý Kůň in the Czech Republic, where the contact happened some 80 generations before those individuals lived.
The most recent and closest is from an individual at Peştera cu Oase, Romania, who had a Neanderthal ancestor approximately five generations prior to their birth.
The dating for Peştera cu Oase is believed to be not much greater than 40,000 years ago, remarkably close to the disappearance of Neanderthals, suggesting that intimate social dynamics were still occurring very late.
In 2025, amid this rapidly evolving research, a new analysis of the first of the skeletons found at Skhūl in the 1930s identified a number of physical features of the skull and jaw that don’t fit H. sapiens’ anatomy.
It suggested something that a number of experts had long suspected: some of those early populations living in the Levant and West Asia already had a genetic ancestry from even earlier contact with Neanderthals.
Further details will have to wait until it’s possible to extract genetic material, but it feels strangely fitting that this clue to humanity’s diversity and deeply blended history had been there at Skhūl, staring us right in the face almost from the very beginning.
Searching for surprises to come
The complex tapestry of H. sapiens’ histories we’ve explored through their bones and genomes doesn’t even touch on the archaeological evidence, which is just as tangled.
The earliest population dispersal seems to have been achieved with technologies essentially the same as those of Neanderthals. But around 60,000 years ago, the cultural evidence associated with Eurasian H. sapiens changes.
One current model proposes that at least three archaeological pulses are evident between 50–42,000 years ago in Europe, with the earliest appearing at Grotte Mandrin, France, where minuscule stone points are likely to have been dart or arrow-tips.
DNA has yet to be extracted from the Grotte Mandrin site, so we’re not sure how the remains there relate to later populations, like those found at Ranis, in Germany.
Moreover, the H. sapiens associated archaeology at Grotte Mandrin (known as ‘Néronians’) disappears soon after, and Neanderthals re-occupy the site for another 15,000 years. It serves as yet another counterpoint to those old myths of our assumed superiority.
Perhaps even more disruptive to the stereotypes of culture and cognition that led to our dominance have been recent findings around the oldest representational paintings in the world.
The depictions of pigs, cow-like creatures and negative handprints were found in an Indonesian cave, rather than a European one, and they’ve been there for at least 51,200 years.
At present, the identity of the ancient artists in Indonesia remains a mystery, but as with everything in this extraordinary field of study, more revelations undoubtedly lie just around the corner.
Maybe the most important thing we’ve found out in the 160 years of research on human origins is that we should expect to be surprised.
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