The idea that all humans evolved from a small population in East Africa turns out to be wrong. Our beginnings were far stranger and more colourful

Giordano Poloni

IMAGINE visiting a tourist attraction in any major world city. There are people from all over – a Nigerian family, a Chinese couple, a German school party, and more. They all look very different from one another, which isn’t surprising given that their ancestors have lived in far-flung parts of the world for generations. Yet, everyone alive today can trace their origins back to Africa, so there must have been a time when such physical differences didn’t exist, right? Actually, no.

In fact, if you were to travel back to the very beginnings of our species and select a random group of humans, they would look unlike anyone living today in Africa or elsewhere. What’s more, they would show extraordinary physical variation – greatly exceeding that in modern human populations. Far from becoming more diverse as we have adapted to life in different parts of the planet, Homo sapiens is more homogeneous today than our ancestors were.

Rewriting human evolution The last few years have been marked by a string of truly remarkable finds with huge implications for where we really come from. Get the latest news and insight in this special report

This is a real puzzle. It simply doesn’t fit with the long-held idea that we arose from a single population in a corner of East Africa. In fact, mounting evidence from fossils, archaeological remains and genetic analysis points in a new direction. Now researchers, including myself, are trying to work out what it all means: why our African forebears were so physically different from each other, and how our species lost the huge variety it once had. …