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Origin of Modern Humans

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Handbook of Paleoanthropology

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Abstract

In the early 1980s, a new period in the debate on modern human origins began, focusing on two alternatives: the Multiregional Evolution model and the Out-of-Africa hypothesis. Over the last few decades, new hominin discoveries, absolute dating, and other evidence have supported the latter view, which proposes a recent common origin of modern humans in Africa. The increasing evidence made the idea of long-term regional evolution up to modern humans in Europe and Asia, following the first expansion out of Africa at nearly 2 Ma, more and more unlikely. Only the African fossil record documents a continuous early modernization process. In contrast, the European evidence shows a replacement of the Neanderthals by modern humans. Also, the claimed evidence for regional continuity in China and Australasia has turned out to be unsubstantiated. Major questions in the current discussion of modern human origins refer to the fossil and molecular evidence for gene flow during the replacement period and to the number of species involved in Middle Pleistocene evolution.

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  1. Abteilung für Humanbiologie, Universität Hamburg, Allende-Platz 2 D-, 20146, Hamburg, Germany

    Prof. Günter Bräuer

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  1. Prof. Günter Bräuer
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  1. Inst. Anthropologie, Universität Mainz FB 10 (1050), Mainz, Germany

    Winfried Henke

  2. American Museum of Natural History Division of Anthropology, New York, New York, USA

    Ian Tattersall

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Bräuer, P.G. (2015). Origin of Modern Humans. In: Henke, W., Tattersall, I. (eds) Handbook of Paleoanthropology. Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-642-27800-6_57-5

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    Origin of Modern Humans
    Published:
    18 June 2015

    DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-642-27800-6_57-5

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    Origin of Modern Humans
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    05 March 2014

    DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-642-27800-6_57-4

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