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A handful of recent discoveries have shattered anthropologists' picture of where humans came from, and when

As anthropologists have discovered new species of human ancestors, our understanding of human history has changed.

Homo naledi

In recent years, anthropologists around the world have discovered new human ancestors , figured out what happened to the Neanderthals, and pushed back the age of the earliest member of our species.

Taken together, these breakthroughs suggest that many of our previous ideas about the human origin story who we are and where we came from were wrong.

Until the last few years, most scientists thought that the first members of our species, Homo sapiens, evolved in East Africa approximately 200,000 years ago . Then humanity remained in Africa for the next 140,000 years, according to this line of thought, before venturing into Europe and Asia in what's known as the "Out of Africa" migration about 60,000 years ago. Those early humans proceeded to take over territories once occupied by other human ancestor species like Neanderthals.

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But this understanding of history has been upended as new discoveries revealed that thefirst humans emerged much earlier than we thought and in a different part of Africa. Rather than simply replacing other competitor species, Homo sapiens seem to have interbred with them .

As researchers make more of these breakthroughs, the human evolutionary puzzle gets more complicated.

Shannon McPherron, MPI EVA Leipzig

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Researchers determined that the bones unearthed in Morocco's Jebel Irhoud region are 315 ,000 years old roughly 100,000 older than the bones previously considered oldest modern human fossils. (Those fossils, found in Ethiopia, were roughly 196,000 years old .)

The remains were also found in a different area of Africa than most other ancient human bones: North Africa instead of East Africa. That suggests our earliest ancestors may not have lived in just one part of the continent.

"There is no Garden of Eden in Africa, or if there is, it is all of Africa," anthropologist Jean-Jacques Hublin, who led the Morocco expedition, said at the time .

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A team of researchers suggested in 2018 that groups of Homo sapiens may have evolved simultaneously all over Africa instead of in one primary location.

Not all of these groups would have looked identical at the start, the scientists said, but they may have been genetically close enough to all be considered Homo sapiens.

According to this line of thinking, distantly related groups of humans across the continent could have become more similar over time instead of first emerging in one area of East Africa then spreading from there.

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A study published in October suggested that every person alive today may have descended from a woman who lived about 200,000 years ago in what is today part of Botswana . Researchers narrowed in on that location using genetic analysis of DNA that gets passed down the female line.

The finding supports the theory that modern human ancestors migrated out of Africa then populated the world, rather than evolving in different pockets around the globe simultaneously.

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Theis Jensen

Typically, ancient DNA is extracted from bones. But in December, anthropologists sequenced an entire genome from a piece of 57,000-year-old chewing gum.

The analysis revealed that the person who chewed the 2-centimeter piece of birch pitch was a woman with dark skin, dark hair, and blue eyes. Nicknamed Lola by anthropologists, this human ancestor had dined on duck and hazelnuts before chewing the gum.

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REUTERS/Nikola Solic

Geneticists finished sequencing the entire Neanderthal genome in 2010. That led them to realize that Neanderthals interbred with modern humans quite a bit. The idea that Homo sapiens killed off and replaced the Neanderthals was eschewed in favor of the hypothesis that the two species became one.

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Bence Viola/Max-Planck-Institute of Evolutionary Anthropology/Reuters

Denisovans disappeared about 50,000 years ago, but not before passing on some of their genes to Homo sapiens, according to a 2018 study. Denisovan DNA can be found in the genes of modern humans across Asia and some Pacific islands. Up to 5% of modern Papua New Guinea residents' DNA shows remnants of interbreeding with Denisovans.

People in Tibet today also possess some Denisovan traits; that could even explain how Sherpas are able to weather high altitudes.

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Thilo Parg/Wikimedia Commons

Anthropologists found the bone in March 2010. A genetic analysis revealed that Denisovans were an enigmatic offshoot of Neanderthals .

Thus far, fossilized Denisovan remains have only been found in the Denisova cave in Russia and in Tibet .

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Wikimedia Commons

In April 2010, anthropologist Lee Berger announced that he and his son had found a new species, called Australopithecus sediba, in Malapa, South Africa.

Australopithecus sediba had teeth and lower limbs that resembled those of our own Homo genus. The ancestors' legs and feet were adapted to walking upright on two legs.

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James Oatway/Reuters

Two spelunkers accidentally stumbled across the Homo naledi fossils in a hidden cave.

All told, the chamber contained 1,550 bones belonging to at least 15 individuals who lived between 330,000 and 250,000 years ago. The timeline suggests this human ancestor might have lived alongside early Homo sapiens in Africa.

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Callao Cave Archaeology Project

The newly discovered species, named Homo luzonensis after the island where it was found, lived between 50,000 and 67,000 years ago.

The ancestor shared traits with older human ancestors like Australopithecus and Homo erectus, as well as with modern-day humans.

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Bae et al. 2017. On the origin of modern humans: Asian perspectives. Science. Image by: Katerina Douka and Michelle O'Reilly

But according to a study from 2017 , the first Homo sapiens may have left Africa and started migrating into Asia more than 120,000 years ago far earlier than scientists had thought.

"The initial dispersals out of Africa prior to 60,000 years ago were likely by small groups of foragers, and at least some of these early dispersals left low-level genetic traces in modern human populations," Michael Petraglia, an author of that study, said in a press release . "A later, major 'Out of Africa' event most likely occurred around 60,000 years ago or thereafter."

The Homo sapiens involved in that "Out of Africa" wave gradually spread into Europe, Asia, and the Pacific.

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Katerina Harvati, Eberhard Karls University of Tbingen

The skull belongs to the oldest modern human discovered outside of Africa. It predates what researchers previously considered to be the earliest evidence of Homo sapiens in Europe by more than 160,000 years. (Anthropologists had previously discovered modern human remains between 42,000 and 45,000 years old in Italy and the UK .)

Another modern human jawbone found in Israel was determined to be 177,000 years old, adding further credence to the idea that Homo sapiens left Africa far earlier than 60,000 years ago.

Kevin Loria contributed to a previous version of this story.

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