One of the best-known theories about human evolution—that the ancestors of Homo sapiens originated in Africa before populating the rest of the world 2 million years ago—is coming under fire. In a challenge to conventional wisdom, Robin Dennell of the University of Sheffield in England and Wil Roebroeks of Leiden University in the Netherlands argue that the "out of Africa" interpretation is built on shaky evidence. Maybe, they say, it is time to look to Asia instead.
Roebroeks and Dennell point out that recent fossil finds in the nation of Georgia suggest an Asian origin as much as an African one. "We know so little about Asia—and, for that matter, Africa—that we should be very careful not to turn a hypothesis into a stone-carved truth simply by repeating it too often," Roebroeks says. "We need comparable data sets from both continents."
Anthropologist Spencer Wells, whose genetic research supports a single ...
