What is the Recent African Origin Model?
The Recent African Origin model, also known as the (Recent) Out-Of-Africa model and the recent single-origin hypothesis, is a scientific hypothesis about the origin of humanity. It asserts that a common ancestor of all modern humans evolved in East Africa between 200,000 and 100,000 years ago. Around 60,000 years ago, a small sub-group left Africa to colonize the rest of the world, displacing other living species in the genus Homo, such as Homo neanderthalis, along the way. By about 15,000 years ago, all the continental land masses besides Antarctica were colonized by our species. While the Recent African Origin model has become nearly universally adopted in the scientific mainstream today, this was not the case for many centuries. In fact, the Recent African Origin model was only formulated in the 1980s, based on studies of modern mitochondrial DNA (mDNA), and subsequently supported by work in physical anthropology. Prior to that, the dominant hypothesis was the multiregional hypothes
