ABSTRACT
This chapter is a personal exploration of the controversy surrounding the place and time scale for modern human origins, and the meaning (or lack of meaning!) that the concept of race now has for anthropological genetics. My research interests built on the idea that genes from modern people can be used to infer the evolutionary history of ancient populations (Cavalli-Sforza et al. 1994), and this gave rise to the hypothesis that all of us shared a common female ancestor, probably an African woman (Cann et al. 1987). Controversy about modern human origins re-erupted, in part, from this and additional data gathered by anthropologists and geneticists in the 1980s and early 1990s (Stringer and Andrews 1988; Vigilant et al. 1991; Thorne and Wolpoff 1992; Templeton 1993).
