Recent African origin of modern humans

There were three waves of modern humans who migrated from the Levant into Europe between 54,000 and 42,000 years ago

The remains suggest that the area was one of the first homes for early humans outside Africa

When compared to the remains of other early humans, the fossil is evidence of human dispersal out of Africa in successive waves

A baby girl who died in Alaska some 11,500 years ago belonged to a formerly-unknown population group whose discovery has shed light on the peopling of the Americas, a study of her genome revealed on Jan. 3.

Neanderthals survived at least 3,000 years longer than we thought in Southern Iberia — what is now Spain — long after they had died out everywhere else, according to new research published in Heliyon.

Archaeologists in Germany have discovered a 9.7 million-year-old set of fossilised teeth they say could trigger the “rewriting” of human history.
The dental remains were found by scientists sifting through gravel and sand in a former bed of the Rhine river near the town of Eppelsheim.

With fossils and DNA, scientists are piecing together a picture of humanity’s beginnings, an origin story with more twists than anything you would find at the movie theater.

The understanding of human origins was turned on its head on June 7 with the announcement of the discovery of fossils unearthed on a Moroccan hillside that are about 100,000 years older than any other known remains of our species, Homo sapiens.

Anthropologists have long sought to pin down the exact location of the proverbial “Garden of Eden” — the region of our planet where the earliest Homo sapiensemerged.
Over the last two decades, a combination of genetic evidence and data from the fossil record led scientists to conclude that the first members of our species evolved in Eastern Africa about 200,000 years ago.

Neanderthals may not have been as lucky as our human ancestors in the long run, but that doesn’t mean the two subspecies didn’t get lucky.