For decades, schoolchildren across the globe were taught our origin story went something like this: An archaic form of Homo sapiens evolved around 200,000 years ago in Africa. By about 100,000 years ago, the population had become anatomically modern humans who, around 50,000 years ago, headed across Eurasia and met up with our distant cousins the Neanderthals (and the closely related Denisovans, not known to science until 2010).
Like a game of Jenga, however, researchers have recently been removing bricks and destabilizing that towering timeline. In 2017, a few more bricks came out, and the conventional chronology of our origins finally toppled.
What we’re left with: Homo sapiens have been around at least 100,000 years longer than we thought, and left Africa much earlier than we believed. And whenever they ran into other hominin populations, well . . .
“Sex happens,” says Erik Trinkaus, a paleoanthropologist at Washington University in St. Louis. “You can draw lines of different lineages on maps, but real populations don’t behave that way.”
