The topic of Homo Sapiens origins is not directly related to our group main subject. But few remarks can be useful for better understanding the whole picture.

 The topic of Homo Sapiens origins is not directly related to our group main subject. But few remarks can be useful for better understanding the whole picture.

Ancient DNA confirmed that Homo Sapiens the modern humans were related to Neanderthals. They were two sister species (or subspecies ) ultimately stemming from the same common ancestor. Homo erectus. Geneticians have found another parallel species that they labeled Denisovan. We learned about Denisovans thanks to ancient DNA studies otherwise few bones were not permitting to classify them.

Now the most surprising result of genetic studies is that modern Africans have virtually no ancestry from Neanderthals and Denisovan. Only modern Eurasians do have. And whatever Africans do have is a result of recent back migration from Eurasia.

This complicates the whole story of human origins. Because the Homo Erectus was already present in Eurasia already 2 million ago ( Dmanisi site in Georgia ) and nothing forbids us to imagine that the forementioned three daughter species ( modern humans, Neanderthals, Denisovand) of hominids formed in Eurasia from the intermediate Homo heidelbergensis.

Nevertheless the phylogenetic trees of Y dna and mtdna still support the African origins of modern humans. The haplogroups A and B are found exclusively in Africa.

David Reich speaks about this contradictions in his book and in this interview.

Apparently the origins of humans was a more complicated story than just a simple out of Africa model. It's possible that deep origins of humans are in Eurasia. Then 400-500 thousands ago they moved to Africa and reexpanded from there 100 thousands years ago.

This by the way is the reason that some caution is needed when speaking about the origins of some old and large haplogroups like the E.

Obviously more research is needed to clarify those subjects.