But among the most intriguing of all the discoveries thus far is that the neat story of Homo sapiens evolving from a single small distinct lineage of archaic humans somewhere in Africa and then spreading out to conquer the world is almost certainly wrong. Instead it now seems likely that several distinctive Homo sapiens lineages that shared a common ancestor around half a million years ago evolved in parallel with one another, and appeared near-simultaneously around 300,000 years ago in North Africa, southern Africa, and the East African Rift Valley, and that all people today are made up of a
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