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have been a relatively recent and restricted one in Africa, based on marked similarities between recent humans in both body form and DNA, and it may have been quite rapid, in one small favored area such as East Africa. Some modern humans dispersed to the Middle East (Israel) about 100,000 years ago, and they had perhaps moved on as far as Australia by about 60,000 years. However, Homo sapiens did not enter Europe until about 35,000 years ago, following the rapid development of more advanced Later Stone Age tools and complex behaviors by African moderns about 50,000 years ago. Such progress finally allowed the moderns to spread into Europe, where, as Cro-Magnons making Upper Paleolithic tools, they quickly took on and replaced the Neanderthals through their superior technology and adaptations. Bear this narrative in mind, as I will revisit it at various times later in this book.
    If RAO is the most accurate model, regional (“racial”) variation only developed during and after the dispersal from Africa, so any seeming continuity of regional features between Homo erectus and present counterparts in the same regions outside of Africa must have been as a result of parallel evolution or coincidence, rather than of genes passed down from archaic predecessors, as argued in the Multiregional model. Like that model, RAO argued that Homo erectus evolved into new forms of humans in inhabited regions outside of Africa, but in RAO these non-African lineages eventually became extinct, without evolving into modern humans. Some, such as the Neanderthals, must have been replaced by the spread of modern humans into their regions, and hence the RAO model not only is popularly known as Out of Africa but is sometimes also known as the Replacement model.
    As RAO gathered support and influence, it increasingly made an impact on the views of people like the American anthropologists Fred Smith and Erik Trinkaus, who believed in continuity outside of Africa but were not classic multiregionalists. Instead, they advanced what has become known as the Assimilation model, which can be seen as a moderate position between the extremes of RAO and what I have dubbed classic Multiregionalism: one where Africa dominated as the source of modern features, but where these were taken up more gradually by people outside of the continent, through a blending of populations. Modern features thus diffused out of Africa rather than being imposed through the invasion and dominance of dispersing moderns, and early moderns outside of Africa could therefore be expected to show features of the “natives” with whom they were mixing. And while the various models of human evolution were adjusting themselves to the post-mtDNA landscape, the genetic work itself was undergoing reevaluations.
    I already mentioned the heavy criticisms of the 1987 “Eve” paper, from the point of view of the samples used, the methods of analysis, the rate of evolution, and the strong conclusions drawn. The team involved in the original work acknowledged that there were deficiencies, and, over the next few years, they set out to address the problems in a series of further analyses that served only to reinforce their conclusions, as we shall see in chapter 7. But as we shall also observe, most workers now agree that mtDNA, while very useful, is only one small part of the genetic evidence we need to reconstruct our evolutionary origins.
    For the rest of this book, I will mainly be discussing three other human species along with our own: Homo erectus , H. heidelbergensis , and H. neanderthalensis . So how do we recognize distinct human species in the fossil record and our own ancestors? Well, that is not a straightforward question, and specialists will give differing answers. (For example, as I explained earlier, multiregionalists often regard Homo sapiens as the only human species on Earth during the last million years, so species like Homo erectus and Homo heidelbergensis have no