Out Of Africa Hypothesis Vs Multiregional Hypothesis

Today, history of the earth and how we all came to be is still debated among many people and even scientist around the world. This topic is important to people because is really tells us how we became who we are today and what events led up to it. The two main hypotheses that are debated are Out of Africa hypothesis and the Multi regional hypothesis. Both of these have strong and weak components to the argument which is why this debate continues today.

This debate is important to understanding humanity because it explains how we came to be and what process it took in order for us to do so. This something that scientists want to get correct so in this case the debate helps to work out possible flaws and to further learn more about our history

This hypothesis states that H. Erectus first evolved in Africa and then migrated and colonized in many areas around the world. The theory then explains that though there was some interbreeding, most populations were isolated. The theory is that then all the populations evolved simultaneously. This then led to distinct regional differences but slowly all evolved into the modern human. This idea says that Homo sapiens evolved from multiple groups of H. Erectus from around the world. This conclusion was drawn paleographic data, not genetic data as much.

Through archeologic data, researchers were able to see similar skulls and features in archaic humans around the world but could not look at genetic data. The bones found from there investigating showed that there were humans with very similar features around the world all at very close times. This theory’s weak point is that they did not look at genetic data at this point. Therefore, the genetics behind this theory don’t match up very well and modern humans today. Today and in the archeological record, humans are too similar for them to have all individually evolved in groups and then slowly start to

According to this research shared by Johanson in his paper Origins of Modern Humans: Multiregional or Out of Africa? “The high degree of similarity between human populations stands in strong contrast to the condition seen in our closest living relatives, the chimpanzees.2 In fact, there is significantly more genetic variation between two individual chimpanzees drawn from the same population than there is between two humans drawn randomly from a single population. Furthermore, genetic variation between populations of chimpanzees is enormously greater than differences between European, Asian and African human populations.” This just helps to further show how this genetic data being retrieved helps so much in the explanation of how we came to be and how, compared to other animals, genetics can vary tremendously yet at the core of humans, they are all the same. Johanson also states “In support of an African origin for Homo sapiens the work of Cann and Wilson1 has demonstrated that the highest level of genetic variation in mtDNA occurs in African populations. This implies that Homo sapiens arose first in Africa and has therefore had a longer period of time to accumulate genetic