Did humanity start in Africa?

When Our Species Began

Our species, Homo sapiens, appeared in Africa about 300,000 years ago. The oldest known fossils come from across the continent:

• Jebel Irhoud, Morocco: about 315,000 years old, the oldest known Homo sapiens fossils.
• Florisbad, South Africa: about 259,000 years old.
• Omo Kibish, Ethiopia: at least 233,000 years old.

Because these finds are spread from the north of Africa to the south, most scientists now think our species took shape across the continent as a whole, with groups meeting and mixing over time, rather than in one single spot.

The Human Family Is Older, and Also African

The wider human family goes back much further, and its earliest chapters are African too:

• About 7 to 6 million years ago: the human line split from the line that led to chimpanzees.
• About 3.2 million years ago: "Lucy" lived in Ethiopia. She was an Australopithecus, meaning an early upright-walking human relative.
• About 2.8 million years ago: the oldest known member of our genus, Homo, lived in Ethiopia. A genus is the family group a species belongs to.
• About 2 million years ago: Homo erectus became the first human species to spread out of Africa, into Asia and Europe.

Leaving Africa

Small groups of Homo sapiens left Africa early. A jawbone from Misliya Cave in Israel is about 177,000 to 194,000 years old. But everyone living outside Africa today descends mainly from a later move out, about 60,000 to 70,000 years ago. Along the way, those travelers mixed with Neanderthals and Denisovans, so people outside Africa carry a small share of their DNA.

Africa also holds more genetic variety than the rest of the world combined, a sign that our species has lived there the longest. Every person alive today traces their deepest roots to Africa.

Was It Only Africans 100,000 Years Ago?

Everyone starts in Africa

Homo sapiens, the species to which all living humans belong, originally evolved somewhere on the African continent between about 300,000 and 200,000 years ago. The oldest confirmed fossils of our species back this up. The earliest known Homo sapiens remains include the Jebel Irhoud fossils from Morocco, about 315,000 years old, the Florisbad Skull from South Africa, about 259,000 years old, and the Omo remains from Ethiopia, about 233,000 years old.

So 100,000 years ago, the overwhelming majority of Homo sapiens were still on the African continent. That much is correct.

The picture is slightly more complex

Fossils show that Homo sapiens had begun to appear outside Africa earlier than scientists once expected. A jawbone found inside a collapsed cave on the slopes of Mount Carmel in Israel reveals that modern humans dwelt there, alongside the Mediterranean, some 177,000 to 194,000 years ago.

A 100,000-year-old jawbone from Zhirendong, China, appears modern enough that it may represent Homo sapiens, and a cave at Daoxian yielded teeth barely distinguishable from our own, suggesting that Homo sapiens groups were already living very far from Africa between 80,000 and 120,000 years ago.

Correction: the 80,000 to 120,000 year date for the Daoxian teeth, found in Fuyan Cave, is disputed. A 2021 study using ancient DNA and several dating methods found that site and others in southern China much younger, and some researchers place the Daoxian teeth within the last 12,000 years. The Misliya jawbone from Israel, about 177,000 to 194,000 years old, remains the strongest evidence of an early move out of Africa.

These were early, tentative forays. Evidence suggests there may have been at least two waves of migration out of Africa, one around 100,000 years ago and another around 60,000 years ago, and outside of Africa, we are all descendants of those who left in that second wave. The first wave largely faded out.

Other human species were also alive

This is the part that often surprises people. Our species is generally believed to have originated in Africa by about 200,000 years ago, and as we spread across the globe we interacted with local archaic human populations. Neanderthals were living across Europe and western Asia, and Homo erectus had been living in Java, Indonesia, for approximately 1.5 million years and made its last stand there around 100,000 years ago, long after it had gone extinct elsewhere in the world.

Evidence shows that modern humans interbred quite extensively with these local archaic populations as they dispersed, which is why Neanderthal and Denisovan genes are found in all living non-African populations.

Correction: Neanderthal DNA is found in all living non-African populations, and many Africans carry a little too, from people who later moved back into Africa. Denisovan DNA is not found everywhere outside Africa: it is mainly in people from Oceania, such as Papua New Guinea and Aboriginal Australians, with smaller amounts in parts of Asia and very little in Europe.

The deepest truth

As Rick Potts, director of the Smithsonian's Human Origins Program, puts it: "The human genome arose in Africa. Everyone is African, and yet not from any one part of Africa." Every human alive today traces their deepest roots to Africa. The only difference between any of us is where the journey eventually stopped and put down roots.

A note on this quote: we could not find a published source for these exact words from Rick Potts. The idea itself is well established: every living person's deepest ancestry traces back to Africa.