The First Humans Out of Africa Weren't Quite Who We Thought

The human family tree is a tangle of twisted branches. Parting the foliage to disentangle the stem of our own species is not so easy.
The classic out-of-Africa hypothesis suggests that Homo sapiens evolved from a distinct lineage of early human that evolved around 150,000 years ago before setting off to spread through Europe and beyond.
But there is another story. A genomic study led by researchers at McGill University and the University of California-Davis suggests our family history isn't a single straight line tracing back through a slowly changing population, but a web connecting a diversity of families stretching across the African continent.
The findings support a multiregional hypothesis, which argues that before our species left Africa for Europe, there was continuous gene flow between at least two different populations.
The First Humans Out of Africa Weren't Quite Who We Thought