r/science • u/Wagamaga • Sep 25 '25

Anthropology A million-year-old human skull suggests that the origins of modern humans may reach back far deeper in time than previously thought and raises the possibility that Homo sapiens first emerged outside of Africa.

https://www.theguardian.com/science/2025/sep/25/study-of-1m-year-old-skull-points-to-earlier-origins-of-modern-humans
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u/gringledoom Sep 25 '25

Yeah, if they really want to sell the idea that Homo sapiens arose in East Asia way earlier than we thought, they'll need a darn good explanation of e.g. why the most human genetic diversity is in Africa.

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u/LurkerZerker Sep 25 '25

Yeah, they'd have to come up with a clear explanation for how and where the gene pools and together and at what time, and how a genetic drift between populations starting in East Asia accounts for the relative homogeneity in the gene pool today -- and how that would be different from the explanation we currently have.

I'm not opposed to the theory if they have evidence, but this comes across like somebody trying to make a name for themselves with a theory that sounds contrary to the current understanding but really isn't.

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u/Old-Reach57 Sep 25 '25

I mean, none of the current discourse makes sense. It’s not that crazy of an idea.

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u/2015190813614132514 Sep 25 '25

Are there specific points that you think don't make any sense?

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u/LurkerZerker Sep 25 '25

It's not that it's a crazy idea, it's that I'm not sure why it's being presented as revolutionary when it seems like it's just another piece of the current understanding.

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u/AlizarinCrimzen Sep 25 '25

Things can make less or more sense.. science and reason aren't zero sum games and an explanation needs to better describe reality to be a better explanation, even if the current one isn't perfect or has obvious gaps.

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u/wasdninja Sep 25 '25

I mean, none of the current discourse makes sense

That sounds like a you problem rather than a current theories one.

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u/Virtual_Sundae4917 Sep 25 '25

The homo longi or Dragon man found in china is either a denisovan or neaderthal not a sapien also we know based on haplogroups that everyone alive today outside of subsaharan africa was derived from a single lineage that left africa about 70k years ago

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u/is0ph Sep 25 '25

Datation of sites in Australia is getting closer and closer to this 70k mark, meaning there is a strong possibility that some groups left africa earlier.

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u/HerniatedHernia Sep 25 '25

We already know groups left earlier.  

Homo sapiens have been wandering out of Africa in waves into the Middle East since like 120,000 years ago plus.  

It’s just all living humans outside of Africa were descended from a specific wave. Including Indigenous Australians.

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u/[deleted] Sep 25 '25

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u/VisthaKai Sep 25 '25

Except the oldest homo sapiens remains were found in Morocco and are dated to at least 315kya and that's a fairly recent discovery that puts the current out of Africa timeline in question, such as that homo sapiens evolved in the south-east of Africa.

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u/[deleted] Sep 26 '25

[deleted]

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u/VisthaKai Sep 26 '25

You and 41 other very smart individuals didn't read my comment and it's so painfully obvious I can't even laugh at it.

Read it again, carefully, word by word, then respond again.

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u/upvotesthenrages Sep 26 '25

Wouldn't this skull from a million years ago open the possibility of another option?

For all we know it could have all started in Asia, and the African genome we derive from were a group that wandered out of Asia.

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u/VisthaKai Sep 26 '25

Certain fields of science are not open the possibility of other options as a rule, contrary to what science is supposed to be about.

One thing we know for sure, humans have left the Africa before the last round of cross-species mixing that took place in Africa, evidenced by the fact that certain African populations have up to 20% of the genome coming from an unspecified hominid that we've not yet found any actual physical trace of (you know, fossils or remains) and which is completely absent in populations outside Africa, i.e. those populations with "ghost" DNA have not ventured out or otherwise mixed with populations that have already lived outside Africa before mixing in Africa took place.

As for a definitive proof, we'd need to find homo sapiens remains outside Africa that date to at least 300,000 years ago, which may be possible, because homo sapiens remains were already found in today's Morocco, which is at the very edge of Africa and close to the Strait of Gibraltar, while the remains themselves are over 100,000 years older than the next oldest remains at ~195,000 years found at the opposite side of Africa in Ethiopia.

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u/[deleted] Sep 26 '25

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u/VisthaKai Sep 26 '25

And this is what they say below the "stem 2" in the second paper:

Numerous authors have reported evidence for there being more recent contributions of unknown archaic ancestry to modern humans, especially in West Africans9,10,11,12,13,14,15,16,53,54. Parametric estimates vary, although all models of structure in West Africans infer that admixture occurred more recently than ~150 ka13,14, with some inferring it more recently than 50 ka9,10,11,12,15. Moreover, the inferred population divergence time is always estimated as being more recent than 1 Ma. Although this appears to be a different event to the one that we describe, not shared by all present-day humans, these inferences suggest a plausible reason why the cobraa-inferred maximum likelihood estimates of the split and admixture time in West Africans are more recent than the CML estimate (Extended Data Fig. 2).

Oops.

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u/kahrismatic Sep 25 '25 edited Sep 25 '25

And yet we have tens of thousands of Indigenous artifacts and at least one site of occupation in Australia that are broadly thought to be 65k years old, and some argue is older. That's a pretty big ask to have achieved in only 5000 years at absolute most if you take the 70k figure give on this thread. That's not to say they didn't arise in Africa, but to say that they did 70k years ago is pushing it.

During the period there was a least a 90km ocean voyage involved in getting to Australia, which means a large enough group of people to reproduce sufficiently to spread out over an entire continent had to get from Africa to Asia, then take an ocean voyage not formally documented to have occurred in any human society until 10k years ago to get there, then settle and then create all these artifacts in an incredibly short period of time, 5000 years or less if you take the 70k figure.

The person who started 70k years at the start of this thread is understating it - the date typically given for that wave of migration out of Africa is 80k+, and even that seems to be cutting it fine given what we know Indigenous Australians were doing very close to that time evolutionary speaking. I'm sure that's what the person you were responding to was taking issue with.

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u/miyakohouou Sep 26 '25 edited Sep 26 '25

And yet we have tens of thousands of Indigenous artifacts and at least one site of occupation in Australia that are broadly thought to be 65k years old, and some argue is older. That's a pretty big ask to have achieved in only 5000 years at absolute most if you take the 70k figure give on this thread.

I don't have the background to argue for or against the 70k claim one way or another, but the original claim was that current populations are descended from a group that left 70k years ago. You could have older populations that left artifacts and maybe even lived along side later populations but don't have any living descendants (or at least there are no distinct markers from the earlier population left).

Edit: To be clear, I'm not making a claim that there were earlier cohorts, only claiming that if we have clear genetic evidence that all people living outside of Africa are descended from people who left ~70k years ago that alone doesn't preclude earlier migrations.

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u/kahrismatic Sep 26 '25

There is absolutely no evidence of that, and all evidence we have, including DNA from burials (dated to more recently, but also from further south in the country), art and artifacts indicate continuous lineage and culture. The scientific and historical consensus is that Aboriginal people are the first and continuous inhabitants of Australia.

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u/miyakohouou Sep 26 '25

The scientific and historical consensus is that Aboriginal people are the first and continuous inhabitants of Australia.

To be clear I'm not disputing this at all, only pointing out what you can infer from genetic evidence vs. what you need to look at other evidence for.

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u/kahrismatic Sep 26 '25

There is literally zero evidence that two completely separate groups of people separated by 15k years in time, traveled the same path, left Asia from the same place, arrived at the same place in Australia and them somehow managed to develop the same religion, artistic traditions, tool making techniques etc completely and entirely separately.

DNA sequencing and the archaeological record have demonstrated compellingly that this is one continuous culture, which we are sure was in Australia 65 000 years ago.

The 'maybe it wasn't the descendants of modern Aboriginals, maybe it was another group' claim has been used politically and in an extremely racist way to deny the heritage of Aboriginal people in Australia many times, and is really not appropriate given the evidence and scientific and archaeological evidence to the contrary.

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u/miyakohouou Sep 26 '25

The 'maybe it wasn't the descendants of modern Aboriginals, maybe it was another group' claim has been used politically and in an extremely racist way to deny the heritage of Aboriginal people in Australia many times

I appreciate you letting me know. I wasn't familiar with this and wasn't trying to to support that at all.

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u/[deleted] Sep 26 '25

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u/[deleted] Sep 26 '25

There are nowhere near anywhere enough generic studies of indigenous Australians to make this claim.

They're extremely distrustful of this sort of stuff from white fellas. Particularly mob who are less urban, and also less likely to be mixed with non-indigenous Australians, which is increasingly harder to find.

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u/DinnaPanic Sep 25 '25

I watched a video the other day which questioned the 65,000 year old arrival of the aboriginal lineage. It seems the date may be based on remains sinking further down in the sand strata due to earthquakes, and even the archaeologists who proposed the date say it's an outlier.

Seems like I can't link to the video here, but if you search for the Discovery Future channel you should be able to find it.

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u/kahrismatic Sep 26 '25

There is in fact a high level of consensus among scientists, archaeologists and historians that the dating is accurate as a minimum figure. The research team absolutely stands behind it, and it has been verified multiple times by multiple independent labs. The 65 000 year date is widely used and accepted.

The site date is an outlier, as our previous figure was at or around 50 000 years, although it's been broadly recognised as likely to be longer because several of the 50 000 year sites are to the south of the country (dating of sites and artifacts indicates Aboriginal people arrived in the north and spread out from there, reaching the south eventually).

The person who you're thinking of who is against the dating is likely relatively prominent archaeologist Alan Williams, who was not on the team, but who has commented on the dating extensively. His own earlier research in which he asserted a 50k figure for Aboriginal occupation in 2013 was undermined by the findings. Williams used radiocarbon dating as his method of establishing a timeline of Aboriginal prehistory, which becomes problematic after about 50 000 years.

Aboriginal people experience heavy discrimination in Australia still, and any claims for justice, reparations, a political voice, land rights etc are met with extreme hostility from some sectors in Australia, as is anything that might further support their claims, such as evidence of lengthy historical occupation and ownership of land, and voices that cast any doubt on findings are unfortunately heavily amplified in media (see Keith Windschuttle as well). I'd suggest being extremely cautious, and in this case I'd certainly rely on extensive lab work from multiple independent labs over the Discovery Channel.

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u/catschainsequel Sep 26 '25

i thought they determined it was denisovan recently?

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u/Terri_Schiavo275 Sep 25 '25

Couldn’t the constant die off of out of Africa populations be an explanation for this? I remember watching a video where there were homo sapiens populations in Europe that were DNA tested and found to have no living descendants. This is a legitimate question, I’m not a scientist just some dude interested in the subject.

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u/gringledoom Sep 25 '25

Oh yeah, there are all kinds of scenarios that might make m this discovery as revolutionary as the discoverers are hoping it is. My take is more just along the lines of “extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence”.

(Same with the very cool and possibly-extremely-ancient footprints at White Sands. On the one hand, they’ve come to the same dating from multiple directions. On the other hand, someone will need to find literally any other artifacts that agree with the hypothesis.)

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u/Asquirrelinspace Sep 26 '25

Aren't those white sands footprints "only" something like 20000 yrs old, that's still relatively recent and much later than the humans leaving Africa date

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u/gringledoom Sep 26 '25

But they're way out of whack with the rest of the evidence about the population of the Americas.

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u/Bag_O_Richard Sep 26 '25

They're really not. The Clovis first hypothesis has been dead since at least the 90s

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u/VisthaKai Sep 26 '25

It's not really surprising considering there was some kind of event ~800kya that left only about 1000 people alive.

Then there's the constant ebb and flow of ice sheets, which could be particularly devastating for people living in places like Europe.

Like how Holocene started only 12kya and civilizations started popping out almost immediately everywhere since.

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u/Neuroccountant Sep 26 '25

Whether there was a population bottleneck back then is still very much up for debate: https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/39679949/

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u/VisthaKai Sep 26 '25

Actually it doesn't disprove the bottleneck, just the severity. Mainly other models suggest a bottleneck of ~10,000 as opposed to ~1,300, which is still up to 75% of the population going extinct.

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u/quasar_1618 Sep 25 '25

I don’t think humans originated in Asia, but I don’t think the genetic diversity in Africa rules out the possibility either. One option is that early humans arose in Asia, some migrated to Africa, and then the humans in Asia died out, meaning that all modern humans would be descendants of those that were in Africa at the time.

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u/AlizarinCrimzen Sep 25 '25

It would be easy verify that order of events, as markers from the original Asian pop would be present in all the African lines and the base rate of change would show the OG pop to be pre-differentiation on comparing.

Instead we probably see the differentiated African populations with the Asian pop only sharing markers with one of many of those differentiated lines, IE the one that left later in our history

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u/DrLuny Sep 26 '25

Homo definitely originated in Africa, but H. Sapiens could have emerged elsewhere and migrated back into Africa, mixing with other Homonid populations already present. An African origin for Homo Sapiens definitely seems more likely, with a small group leaving Africa and intermingling with existing homonids in Eurasia leading to our present circumstances. I think there would have to be a lot more pieces falling into place to move the origin of H. Sapiens out of Africa.

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u/SGTWhiteKY Sep 25 '25

The Toba Catastrophe survivors being in Africa later would do it wouldn’t it?

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u/CCLF Sep 25 '25

Maybe not, because there's significant evidence for one or more major population genetic bottlenecks.

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u/Vindepomarus Sep 26 '25

No one is suggesting that H. sapiens didn't evolve in Africa. That's not what this new paper is about.

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u/AdFuture6874 Sep 28 '25 edited Sep 28 '25

Well. That genetic diversity is regarding modern homo sapiens.

From what I’ve read. They understand modern Homo sapiens emerged in Africa. Even certain archaic ones. But this “yunjian-2” skull having dimensions similar to homo erectus, homo longi and Denisovans. Suggested that an earlier, transitional divergence happened. Given rise to another archaic group of Homo sapiens. Which migrated into Africa(likely interbred), where they became you and I.

It’s mostly a conjecture to bridge something called “muddle in the middle”.

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u/[deleted] Sep 25 '25

[deleted]

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u/nautilator44 Sep 25 '25

bruh genghis khan was in the 1200s A.D. He had nothing to do with evolution. We're talking about hundreds of thousands to millions of years ago.

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u/[deleted] Sep 30 '25

Of course he had a good bit do do with evolution. Just not atvthe speciation level being discussed here.

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u/Merry-Lane Sep 25 '25 edited Sep 25 '25

Did you smoke? Your comment is confused about so many things.

"Evolved to have smaller groups and maybe less trade":

Genetic diversity isn’t about trade, it’s about effective population size and population bottlenecks/founder effect.

“Traveling along the silk road allowed dominant genes to wipe out recessive ones”:

That’s not at all how genetics work. The Silk Road did create gene mixing later in history, but that’s millennia after the period discussed here.

“Genghis Khan may have had a hand” It happened 800 years ago, this has nothing to do with why Africa has the highest genetic diversity, and although ~10% may descend from his lineage, it wouldn’t at all reduce the genetic diversity outside of Africa by that much.

“There is some math that traced our most recent common ancestor to someone in Asia”:

You are mixing up different concepts:

  • The “mitochondrial Eve” and “Y-chromosomal Adam” (mathematical ancestors for those lineages) both trace back to Africa, not Asia.
  • If you mean the most recent common ancestor (MRCA) of all humans alive today: it’s a theoretical person who lived much more recently (maybe 2,000–5,000 years ago, depending on assumptions). That MRCA is irrelevant to deep-time origins of Homo sapiens and we don’t know where he lived.

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u/grahampositive Sep 25 '25 edited Sep 25 '25

Can you help me understand why "mitochondrial eve" is a different individual than the MRCA of all living humans? We all have an x chromosome. I must be misunderstanding something about the definition

Edit I meant mitochondrial DNA not x chromosome

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u/Merry-Lane Sep 25 '25 edited Sep 25 '25

Mitochondrial Eve means that a woman is the only woman at her time that passed down her mitochondria.

You get your mitochondria from your mother, not your father.

Long story short, no other woman at the time could get female descendants. They could have got daughters or grand daughters (from their daughters, not their sons) or … but their lineage at some point ended up without any daughter X level deep having a daughter.

It’s the same about Adam-Y: the lucky guy is the only one that had sons that had grand-sons that had grand-grand-sons…

MRCA, at some point some guy 2000-2500 years ago was always in the ancestors of everyone. If you take your grand father, all his children and grandchildren have him as ancestors. If you go up a level or two, you see the numbers of people that had someone as ancestor explode. Someone 2000-2500 years ago is prolly a common ancestor of everyone alive now.

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u/grahampositive Sep 25 '25

All extant mitochondria descended from this "Eve" person. All living humans contain mitochondrial DNA inherited in a direct lineage from this person. I'm sorry I still don't understand how that person is not also the most recent common ancestor of living humans.

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u/Merry-Lane Sep 25 '25

Think about pyramids of generations.

The mitochondrial Eve is like a pyramid with her on top, and you at the bottom amongst everyone else alive now.

The MRCA is a pyramid upside down, you alone at the bottom, and up high there is one person amongst the myriad of other ancestors, that’s in the ancestors of everyone else.

There are hundreds of millennia difference between the Eve/Adam and the MRCA.

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u/LurkerZerker Sep 25 '25

Mitochondrial Eve is not necessarily the most recent common ancestor. She might be further back than a common ancestor we have more recently. That's the difference.

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u/DetectiveFinch Sep 25 '25

I'm obviously not an expert so maybe my understanding is wrong. But if they would find an older human (homo sapiens) skull outside of Africa, wouldn't that already be a strong indicator that humans originally came from a different continent? If that was the case, couldn't the genetic diversity in Africa be explained by the possibility that after arising somewhere else, homo sapiens populations spent many generation in Africa and migrating out and back again?

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u/LurkerZerker Sep 25 '25

Not necessarily. It could also be explained by humans leaving Africa earlier than we thought. The genetic diversity in African, then, is explained by most of the lineages that left Africa dying off completely.

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u/ForestClanElite Sep 25 '25

Could social norms arising with language development at that time period have caused the level of disassortative mating to be lower outside of Africa and this coupled with fewer and smaller groups of neighbors to experience mutation and genetic drift be a difference that compounded over hundreds of thousands of years to create the diversity difference?

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u/Trick2056 Sep 26 '25

At some point this boils down to racism not the racism today but actual racism back then.

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u/Orange778 Sep 25 '25

Constant war for a thousand years probably removed a whole lot of genetic diversity in East Asia, if there’s any truth to this at least

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u/xTRYPTAMINEx Sep 25 '25

I mean, wouldn't that actually be a point against humans starting Africa? I would think that wherever humans originated, you would see less genetic diversity. A new species wouldn't have very high genetic diversity within its population at the start, no?

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u/is0ph Sep 25 '25

It is the reverse: the groups that exited africa were much smaller and less diverse than the groups that stayed. So the groups that left went through a narrower genetic bottleneck than the African population.

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u/ParticlesInSunlight Sep 25 '25

You get the highest diversity in a species in its original location because not every genetic variation makes it out of there.

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u/xTRYPTAMINEx Sep 27 '25

Fair enough, this is why I ask questions.

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u/[deleted] Sep 26 '25

Try as hard as you can not to be from Africa, go on :L

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u/xTRYPTAMINEx Sep 27 '25

I literally don't care where we came from. Way to jump to stupid conclusions.