A pan-African origin
Our species does not begin in one place — it emerges from a network of populations across a continent.
- When
- —
- Duration
- 200 thousand years
- Known to
- ± 50 thousand years
- Era
- Middle Pleistocene, Quaternary
The garden-of-Eden model, in which Homo sapiens arose in a single East African population, has largely given way to an African multiregional or pan-African view: a set of semi-isolated populations spread across the continent, repeatedly separated by desert and reconnected by wetter phases, exchanging genes and traits over hundreds of thousands of years. Modern human anatomy assembles piecemeal across this network rather than appearing whole. Fossils from Morocco, Ethiopia, South Africa and Kenya all contribute pieces.