Enlarge / Based on the new data, nearly every out-of-Africa map available on the web is wrong in some way. This is perhaps the least wrong. (credit: NIH)
By now, the big picture of humanity’s origins is pretty clear. Modern humans evolved in Africa over 100,000 years ago, but they took tens of thousands of years to leave the continent. Once they did, they rapidly spread across Asia and Australia, mating with some of the pre-modern (read: archaic) humans along the way.
But that big picture, often called “Out of Africa,” has a number of details missing. For one, our understanding of the genetic diversity within Africa is startlingly bad—so bad that we missed an entirely distinct African Y chromosome lineage for decades. And there have been numerous debates about the number of times humanity has left Africa. Was it a single big migration, or did we depart in waves?
A new series of papers has narrowed the scope of the controversy considerably. While there may have been more than one push out of Africa, there’s only one that really ended up mattering.
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Source: Ars Technica – Humanity left Africa in one big surge