Lineage separation· Where Sapiens lives

The out-of-Africa separation

70 ka

The lineage that will people the whole world parts from the African populations. Nearly everyone alive outside Africa today descends from this single departure, and those who went before left almost nothing behind.

What the evidence shows

The date has two faces, and as much as twenty millennia separate them. Genetic estimates put the departure between 70,000 and 50,000 years ago. But the ancestors of every non-African sequenced so far share a single episode of interbreeding with Neanderthals, dated between 49,000 and 45,000 years ago, which means they were still one population then. Leaving Africa and scattering across Eurasia are therefore two separate events. Between them the lineage held together, somewhere, long enough for a single meeting with Neanderthals to mark all of its descendants. Modern human remains older than 50,000 years found outside Africa appear to belong to other non-African populations.

Dating & uncertainty

Genetic estimates place the departure between 70,000 and 50,000 years ago, yet the ancestors of all non-Africans were still a single population much later: they share one episode of Neanderthal interbreeding dated between 49,000 and 45,000 years ago. The date drawn here is therefore a departure and not a dispersal, and as much as twenty millennia may lie between the two.

Sources

1. Vallini, L. et al. (2022), Journal of Anthropological Sciences · The future of the Eurasian past: highlighting plotholes and pillars of human population movements in the Late Pleistocene
2. Sümer et al. (2024), Nature · Earliest modern human genomes constrain timing of Neanderthal admixture
3. Bergström et al. (2021), Nature · Origins of modern human ancestry
4. Hallast et al. (2020), Human Genetics · A Southeast Asian origin for present-day non-African human Y chromosomes