ABSTRACT
For decades paleoanthropologists have pondered whether modern humans evolved throughout the human geographic range or in only a small part. Debate continues, but the accumulating fossil, archaeological, and genetic evidence increasingly points to a restricted origin in Africa from which modern humans spread to replace or swamp their nonmodern contemporaries elsewhere. The case is particularly clear with regard to the replacement of the Neanderthals in Europe and western Asia beginning 50,000 to 40,000 years ago and more uncertain with respect to the fate of nonmodern people in eastern Asia. It is not that eastern Asia suggests a contrary result, but that it presents too few data for any persuasive conclusion.
