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Dispersal throughout Africa

Homo sapiens are believed to have emerged in Africa about 300,000 years ago, based in part on thermoluminescence dating of artifacts and remains from Jebel Irhoud, Morocco, published in 2017. The Florisbad Skull from Florisbad, South Africa, dated to about 259,000 years ago, has also been classified as early Homo sapiens. Previously, the Omo remains, excavated between 1967 and 1974 in Omo National Park, Ethiopia, and dated to 200,000 years ago, were long held to be the oldest known fossils of Homo sapiens.

In September 2019, scientists reported the computerized determination, based on 260 CT scans, of a virtual skull shape of the last common human ancestor to anatomically modern humans, representative of the earliest modern humans, and suggested that modern humans arose between 260,000 and 350,000 years ago through a merging of populations in East and South Africa.

In July 2019, anthropologists reported the discovery of 210,000 year old remains of a H. sapiens and 170,000 year old remains of a H. neanderthalensis in Apidima Cave in southern Greece, more than 150,000 years older than previous H. sapiens finds in Europe.

Early modern humans expanded to Western Eurasia and Central, Western and Southern Africa from the time of their emergence. While early expansions to Eurasia appear not to have persisted, expansions to Southern and Central Africa resulted in the deepest temporal divergence in living human populations. Early modern human expansion in sub-Saharan Africa appears to have contributed to the end of late Acheulean (Fauresmith) industries at about 130,000 years ago, although very late coexistence of archaic and early modern humans, until as late as 12,000 years ago, has been argued for West Africa in particular.

The ancestors of the modern Khoi-San expanded to Southern Africa before 150,000 years ago, possibly as early as before 260,000 years ago, so that by the beginning of the MIS 5 " megadrought ", 130,000 years ago, there were two ancestral population clusters in Africa, bearers of mt-DNA haplogroup L0 in southern Africa, ancestral to the Khoi-San, and bearers of haplogroup L1-6 in central/eastern Africa, ancestral to everyone else. There was a significant back-migration of bearers of L0 towards eastern Africa between 120 and 75 kya.

Expansion to Central Africa by the ancestors of the Central African forager populations (African Pygmies) most likely took place before 130,000 years ago, and certainly before 60,000 years ago.

The situation in West Africa is difficult to interpret due to a sparsity of fossil evidence. Homo sapiens seems to have reached the western Sahelian zone by 130,000 years ago, while tropical West African sites associated with H. sapiens are known only from after 130,000 years ago. Unlike elsewhere in Africa, archaic Middle Stone Age sites appear to persist until very late, down to the Holocene boundary (12,000 years ago), pointing to the possibility of late survival of archaic humans, and late hybridization with H. sapiens in West Africa.