outside Africa we nearly went extinct at least once, and suffered a major population crash around 70 ka, just before the majority of interbreeding with Neanderthals. Moreover, despite dispersing populations obviously spreading all the way into Australia by 65 ka – adapting to arid deserts and wet mountain forests, even an ocean crossing to Indonesia – there’s no clear sign of H. sapiens in Central or Western Europe until more than 20,000 years later.
