Is the Out of Africa Theory Outdated?

The Out of Africa theory says that our species, Homo sapiens, evolved in Africa. It says a small group then left Africa and replaced the other humans of Europe and Asia. For thirty years it has been the textbook answer.

I wanted to see how well it holds up. On this page I put the model next to the finds that do not fit it. I also look at how the people who question it are treated.

What the Out of Africa model says

The model rests on two kinds of evidence. The first is fossils. The oldest skulls that look like ours were found in Africa, mostly in Ethiopia.

The second is genetics. Living Africans carry more genetic variety than everyone else combined. Geneticists read that as a sign that Africa is the oldest home of our species.

In the classic version, modern humans left Africa around 60,000 years ago. They spread across Asia, Europe and Australia. The other human groups died out without mixing in.

The rival idea is called the multiregional model. Milford Wolpoff, Wu Xinzhi and Alan Thorne set it out in 1984. In their view, human groups in Africa, Europe and Asia evolved side by side over a long time and kept trading genes. Modern humans then grew out of that whole network, not from one small group.

For many years the multiregional model was treated as beaten. As I show below, parts of it have quietly come back.

Jebel Irhoud: older and in the wrong place

The first crack came from Morocco. In 2017 Jean-Jacques Hublin and his team published new fossils from Jebel Irhoud, a site near the Atlantic coast. They dated them to 315,000 years, give or take 34,000 years (Nature; dating in Nature).

That is more than 100,000 years older than the Ethiopian skulls. It is also on the other side of the continent, far from the East African “cradle”.

The faces look modern. The braincases are long and low, more like older humans. Hublin’s team took a clear position.

Furthermore, it shows that the evolutionary processes behind the emergence of H. sapiens involved the whole African continent.

Jean-Jacques Hublin et al., Nature (2017)

In other words, there was no single Garden of Eden in East Africa. Our features came together slowly, in many places. The team still keeps the story inside Africa. But the neat picture of one birthplace is gone.

Misliya and Skhul: out of Africa far too early

The next crack came from Israel. For decades the oldest modern humans outside Africa were the burials at Skhul and Qafzeh, two caves near Mount Carmel.

Rainer Grün and colleagues dated the Skhul burials to between 100,000 and 135,000 years ago (Journal of Human Evolution, 2005). That was already about twice as old as the classic 60,000-year exit.

The textbook answer was that Skhul was a failed early trip. The people there died out, and the real exit came later.

Then in 2018 Israel Hershkovitz and a large team published a jaw from Misliya Cave, also on Mount Carmel. It dated to between 177,000 and 194,000 years ago (Science).

This finding changes our view on modern human dispersal and is consistent with recent genetic studies, which have posited the possibility of an earlier dispersal of Homo sapiens around 220,000 years ago.

Israel Hershkovitz et al., Science (2018)

So people of our kind were standing outside Africa almost 200,000 years ago. The “failed trip” explanation now has to cover a much longer stretch of time.

Apidima: a modern skull in Greece

In 2019 Katerina Harvati and her team looked again at two skulls from Apidima Cave in southern Greece. They had been found in the late 1970s and then sat in a museum for forty years.

The team dated one skull, Apidima 1, to more than 210,000 years. They say it mixes modern and older features. The other skull, Apidima 2, is younger and looks like a Neanderthal (Nature).

Our findings support multiple dispersals of early modern humans out of Africa, and highlight the complex demographic processes that characterized Pleistocene human evolution and modern human presence in southeast Europe.

Katerina Harvati et al., Nature (2019)

Not everyone agrees. Marie-Antoinette de Lumley studied the same two skulls. Her 2019 monograph calls them “anténéanderthaliens”, which means early forms on the road to the Neanderthals, not modern humans.

I find it telling that the same bones can be read in two such different ways. The fossil record is thin. Much depends on who holds the skull.

Denisovans and Neanderthals live on in us

The strongest change came from DNA. In 2010 Svante Pääbo’s group published a draft of the Neanderthal genome. Richard Green was the first author (Science).

They found that people outside Africa share more genetic variants with Neanderthals than Africans do. Their explanation is that the two groups had children together, before the ancestors of Europeans and Asians split up.

That one result broke the strict version of Out of Africa. The newcomers did not simply replace the Neanderthals. They mixed with them, and many of us still carry a small part of that ancestry.

The same year, David Reich and the Pääbo group read the DNA of a finger bone from Denisova Cave in Siberia. It belonged to a human group nobody had known about. They named it the Denisovans (Nature).

This population was not involved in the putative gene flow from Neanderthals into Eurasians; however, the data suggest that it contributed 4-6% of its genetic material to the genomes of present-day Melanesians.

David Reich et al., Nature (2010)

A whole people was found from a bone the size of a fingertip. For years the Denisovans had no face at all. They were known only from their DNA.

Reich himself now questions part of the old story. In an interview I keep on this site, he says the period between about 2 million and 500,000 years ago is open.

I think there's been an assumption where Africa's been at the center of everything for many many millions of years

David Reich, A Key Period in Human Evolution Wasn't in Africa

He gives the reason in the same clip.

if you look at the genetic evidence we have many early branches from Eurasia and only one from Africa

David Reich, A Key Period in Human Evolution Wasn't in Africa

He is careful. He also says that ancient DNA survives better in cold Eurasia than in hot Africa, and that we need old African DNA to settle it. You can watch the clip on A Key Period in Human Evolution Wasn’t in Africa.

The Chinese finds and the multiregional view

China has its own long record of human fossils. Many Chinese researchers have long seen continuity there, from old Homo erectus to people today. This is the regional version of the multiregional model.

In 2015 Wu Liu and colleagues reported 47 human teeth from Fuyan Cave in Daoxian, southern China. The teeth are more than 80,000 years old, perhaps up to 120,000 years (Nature).

Our study shows that fully modern morphologies were present in southern China 30,000-70,000 years earlier than in the Levant and Europe.

Wu Liu et al., Nature (2015)

Fully modern teeth in China before 80,000 years ago do not sit well with a single exit around 60,000 years ago. The authors still place these people in the Homo sapiens family. But the timing has to move.

Then came the Harbin skull. It was found in northeast China and hidden in a well for decades. In 2021 Qiang Ji and colleagues named it a new species, Homo longi, or “Dragon Man” (The Innovation).

In 2025 a team took proteins from that skull. The proteins match the Denisovans. The skull is at least 146,000 years old (Science).

So the Denisovans finally have a face, and it comes from China. Asia was not an empty stage waiting for Africans to arrive. It had its own deep human story.

Further south, the islands tell the same thing. In 2019 a team described Homo luzonensis, a small human from Luzon in the Philippines (Nature). Someone had crossed the sea to get there long before modern humans.

Homo naledi: how dissent gets treated

The fight over Homo naledi shows how hard the field can push back. Homo naledi is a small-brained human from the Rising Star cave in South Africa. Lee Berger’s team found it in 2013.

In 2017 the team dated the bones to between about 236,000 and 335,000 years ago. John Hawks and colleagues pointed out what that means (eLife).

H. naledi casts the fossil and archaeological records into a new light, as we cannot exclude that this lineage was responsible for the production of Acheulean or Middle Stone Age tool industries.

Lee Berger, John Hawks et al., eLife (2017)

Put simply, a small-brained cousin lived next to the first Homo sapiens. It might even have made some of the stone tools we credit to our own kind.

In 2023 Berger went further. His team claimed that Homo naledi buried its dead and carved marks on the cave walls. The reaction was hard. In the first review round the journal eLife rated the burial evidence as “inadequate” (eLife).

María Martinón-Torres and colleagues answered in the Journal of Human Evolution. Their title says it all: “No scientific evidence that Homo naledi buried their dead and produced rock art” (DOI).

Some of the criticism was fair. The team had announced the claims in the press and in a Netflix film before review. Critics also say cavers and animals may have left marks in the cave.

Then the team revised the paper. In 2025 eLife published the final version. Its new assessment rated the evidence “incomplete”, not “inadequate”. One reviewer was convinced by the burials. Another was not (eLife).

I see the pattern here. A claim that breaks the rule “only big brains bury their dead” got the strongest pushback. A claim that fits the rule would have passed more quietly. Both sides can be right on details. But the bar is clearly not the same for every idea.

The first people in the Americas

The same pattern runs through the story of the Americas. For a long time the textbooks said people arrived about 13,000 years ago. The California Academy of Sciences now says modern humans reached the Americas after 20,000 years ago.

The finds keep pushing that line back. A 2024 study in PLOS ONE found cut marks on the bones of a glyptodont, a giant armadillo relative, in the Pampas of Argentina. The bones are about 21,000 years old.

In 2020 researchers reported stone tools from Chiquihuite Cave in northern Mexico. They suggest people were there around 33,000 years ago.

Monte Verde in Chile shows people more than 18,000 years ago. In Brazil, rocks shaped by humans about 20,000 years ago were found at Serra da Capivara in Piauí and at Santa Elina in Mato Grosso (Pesquisa FAPESP).

Early people in Japan

Japan has some of the oldest skeletons in East Asia. At Shiraho Saonetabaru Cave on Ishigaki Island, workers building an airport found a nearly complete skeleton about 27,000 years old.

On Okinawa, the four Minatogawa skeletons are 20,000 to 22,000 years old. A DNA study reported by the Asahi Shimbun suggests that modern Japanese descend in part from these Paleolithic people (Asahi Shimbun).

An older Japanese study sees Minatogawa Man as an early modern human of East Asia. It calls him a likely ancestor of the Jomon people (J-STAGE).

An older story: the flood of Pan in Oahspe

There is also a very different account of how people spread. It comes from Oahspe, a channeled book published by John Ballou Newbrough in 1882. It is a spiritual text, not a historical record.

Oahspe describes a great flood that sank a continent in the Pacific called Pan, also named Wagga. It places this about 24,000 years before the Kosmon era, around 22,118 BC.

36. For behold, I will bring a flood of waters upon the earth, even above the highest mountains; for I will destroy the corruption thereof, and purge it of all uncleanness.

Oahspe, page 133

In the story, the I’hins, a small faithful people, were saved in 138 ships with pairs of animals and food. After 150 days the ships landed in five regions. Oahspe names them Guatama (the Americas), Jaffeth (China), Shem (India), Ham (Africa and Egypt) and Yista (Japan).

I do not offer this as science. I find it striking that it pictures people arriving in several places at once, from the sea. That is closer to the multiple-dispersal picture than to one small group walking out of Africa.

Where I land

I do not think the Out of Africa theory is simply wrong. Most geneticists still place the main root of modern humans in Africa. The fossils from Morocco support that too.

What has collapsed is the simple version. There was no single cradle, no single exit and no clean replacement. Jebel Irhoud points to a pan-African origin, spread over the whole continent. Apidima puts a modern skull in Greece more than 210,000 years ago. Homo luzonensis shows that someone crossed the sea to the Philippines long before us. And most of us still carry Neanderthal and Denisovan DNA. That means our ancestors mixed with other kinds of humans, and the traces stayed in our genes.

So the picture I see is not one cradle. It is several places where humans changed. I call them gardens.

This is where I land. I think those changes were not all natural. I think the Elohim and the Anunnaki had a hand in them.

The Bible itself speaks in the plural when man is made.

Then God said, "Let us make man in our image, after our likeness."

Genesis 1:26 (ESV)

The Hebrew word for God in that verse is Elohim. The Italian translator Mauro Biglino reads it as a group of real beings, not as one God.

Elohim is undeniably a plural term, and it indicates a group of individuals to which the Bible's protagonist belongs: Yahweh.

Mauro Biglino

I go deeper into his reading on the Elohim.

Genesis then places the garden in one direction. “And the Lord God planted a garden in Eden, in the east” (Genesis 2:8, ESV). A garden that is planted is a place someone built on purpose.

Zecharia Sitchin read the Sumerian tablets in the same way. In his books the Anunnaki came to Earth and engineered a worker, the Adamu, by mixing their genes with those of an earlier human. For Sitchin, Adam was a lab result. I follow the Anunnaki further on the Aesir and the Anunnaki.

Paul Wallis, who served in the Anglican church in Australia, reads the opening of Genesis as a story of repair, not of first creation.

this is not a creation story this is the memory of a devastation of the planet and a rehabilitation of the planet

Paul Wallis, A Populated Universe

Wallis also says the old stories spoke of many Elohim, and that later editors merged them into one God. Many Elohim fit a world with more than one garden.

The channeled source Bashar says it outright.

There were many different labs around your planet, but the primary one was in the Middle East.

Bashar, What Really Happened in the Garden of Eden?

I collect those gardens on There Were Many Gardens of Eden.

I do not think every change was a gift. Some groups may have received an upgrade, such as a bigger brain or a longer life. Others may have received a downgrade, such as a shorter life or a narrower mind. The genes we carry from Neanderthals and Denisovans could be the fingerprints of those different gardens.

There is also a simple human reason. People like to stay where they are. Even people who flee a war often go back home when they can. A known place feels safe. You know its trees and plants, its rivers, its seasons and its animals. A long walk means hostile tribes, predators and dangerous waters. So I find it hard to believe that a few groups walked out of one cradle and filled the whole world. Several gardens, each with its own people, fit human nature better.

For me, the many gardens explain five things that one cradle cannot.

• The stories of giants. Almost every culture remembers them, from the Nephilim of Genesis to the giants found worldwide and the giants of the Americas.
• The half human, half animal beings of myth. I read them as memories of failed or forbidden experiments, as on my page on genetic hybridization.
• The different races. Each garden worked with its own local humans, and so each produced its own people, as in Adams and Eves.
• The fast spread of humans across the world. People who like to stay home did not have to walk that far. They were placed in several gardens at once.
• The many stories of sky people and star relations. Peoples all over the world say their ancestors came from the stars, often from the Pleiades.

That is why this page belongs in my section on forbidden history. The same thing happened at Göbekli Tepe. A new find has to fight much harder than an old assumption.

I keep a wider list of such finds on Discoveries That Push the Timeline of Civilization. For the later step, from scattered peoples to the first cities, see Sumer, the first known civilization. I will update this page when ancient DNA from Africa or China changes the picture again.