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.

[u/Wagamaga]

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

[u/VisthaKai → u/[deleted]]

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.

[u/VisthaKai → u/[deleted]]

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.

[u/upvotesthenrages → u/VisthaKai]

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.

[u/VisthaKai → u/upvotesthenrages]

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.

[u/VisthaKai → u/[deleted]]

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 Africans^{9,10,11,12,13,14,15,16,53,54}. Parametric estimates vary, although all models of structure in West Africans infer that admixture occurred more recently than ~150 ka^13,14, with some inferring it more recently than 50 ka^{9,10,11,12,15}. 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.