Thought of the day: “Modern” human origins

The first class I took that really hooked me on paleoanthropology was an undergraduate seminar on Modern Human Origins. The class was wonderful. We read a huge amount of primary literature and for whatever reason, the class, although we were all undergraduates, were incredibly engaged and vocal on the issue, leading to great class discussions. Since I took that class almost fifteen years ago, the debate surrounding modern human origins has shifted dramatically. At the time, the narrative was dominated by the strong Out of Africa (OOA) model. Multiregional evolution was also intricately involved in our discussions, but most of the talk had to do with whether the OOA was correct or not. As such, our examination of the fossil, archaeological and genetic data was put into the context of does this refute replacement/continuity or not? Productive, yes, but also shoehorned into a necessarily simple understanding of the evolutionary processes surrounding the emergence of modernity. The shift in narratives over the past decade have made it clear that the story of the emergence of modernity is a complex evolutionary event spread out across time and space. As a result, no singular line of evidence is sufficient to address the scope of the question. Contemporary discussions of the origins of modernity are thus necessarily multi-disciplinary. The genetic, archaeological and fossil evidence are inextricably linked in the hypotheses associated with modern human origins.