Lineage separation· Where Sapiens lives
The out-of-Africa separation
70 ka
The lineage that will people the whole world parts from the African populations. Nearly everyone alive outside Africa today descends from this single departure, and the earlier attempts left almost nothing behind.
What the evidence shows
The date has two faces, and they are twenty millennia apart. Genetic estimates put the departure between 70,000 and 50,000 years ago. But the ancestors of every non-African sequenced so far share a single episode of interbreeding with Neanderthals, dated between 49,000 and 45,000 years ago, which means they were still one population then. Leaving Africa and scattering across Eurasia are therefore two separate events. Between them the lineage held together, somewhere, long enough for one meeting with Neanderthals to mark all of its descendants. Modern human remains older than 50,000 years found outside Africa belong to other, different non-African populations.
Dating & uncertainty
Genetic estimates place the expansion between 70,000 and 60,000 years ago. Yet the ancestors of all non-Africans were still a single population much later: they share one episode of Neanderthal interbreeding dated between 49,000 and 45,000 years ago. Leaving Africa and scattering across Eurasia are therefore two different dates, some fifteen millennia apart.
Sources
- Vallini, L. et al. (2022), Journal of Anthropological Sciences · The future of the Eurasian past: highlighting plotholes and pillars of human population movements in the Late Pleistocene
- Sümer et al. (2024), Nature · Earliest modern human genomes constrain timing of Neanderthal admixture
- Bergström et al. (2021), Nature · Origins of modern human ancestry
- Hallast et al. (2020), Human Genetics · A Southeast Asian origin for present-day non-African human Y chromosomes