John Hawks on the Misliya jawbone

Below I quote John Hawks on the importance of the Misliya cave jawbone. His opinion is very interesting. Read his full post here.

(See my Previous post on this jawbone, which places modern humans outside of Africa some 177,000 to 194,000 years ago, far earlier than previously thought).

Hawks wrote:

"...There is a major change underway in how we understand “out of Africa”. I don’t think the traditional framing of “out of Africa” is very effective anymore, as leaving Africa is a tiny event, repeated many times over the last several hundred thousand years.
In the context of other discoveries, I think that “modern human” has lost much of the meaning it may once have had.
The big questions concern what was happening inside Africa, where many genetically diverse populations existed and interacted. How many ancestral populations gave rise to the growing population of modern humans after 100,000 years ago? How many African-derived people were involved in mixture with Neandertals 250,000 years ago, or 120,000 years ago? Did African-derived humans make it to China, or to Java, before 100,000 years ago?
Those are open questions, with some evidence pointing toward faster, more widespread dispersal, more mixture, and repeated genetic replacements."

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