As far as theories go, “Out of Africa” has a fairly recent origin. In 1970, “no palaeoanthropologist of whom I am aware held the view that Africa was the evolutionary home of modern humans,” says anthropologist Chris Stringer. While Louis and Mary Leakey had unearthed the iconic toolmaker , he stood just over a metre high) and . One of the reigning theories was “multiregional evolution” – that we moderns arose through mingling. Hominins, notoriously footloose and fancy-free, kept the genes flowing freely and eventually produced the single melting-pot variety that is us. Chris Stringer’s PhD thesis explored that theory. Travelling around Europe in 1971, he measured Neanderthal skulls to examine whether they were the likely ancestors for stone-age modern humans. He concluded they were not, and that African fossils like Omo 1, discovered in Ethiopia in 1967, were better candidates. It was an argument Stringer would continue to build as more and more African skeletons with reliable dates were unearthed in the next decades.
