Where did our species come from? It's a question we still don't have the answer to.

Scientists are sure that Homo sapiens first evolved in Africa, and we know that every person alive today can trace their genetic ancestry to there.

It has long been thought that we began in one single east or south African population, which eventually spread into Asia and Europe. But it seems that things were more complex than that - the link between those hominins and the humans on Earth today is neither straight nor simple.

A new paper, published in Trends in Ecology and Evolution, suggests that there is plenty of evidence that H. sapiens actually emerged within the interactions of many different populations across Africa. Most of these were often isolated from each other, connecting only occasionally.

Eleanor Scerri, of the University of Oxford and the lead author of the paper, says, 'Fossil, archaeological and genetic evidence suggests that the idea of Homo sapiens evolving in just one population in a single region is too simplistic.

'In this paper, a group of 23 scientists worked together to present a much more complicated view of the early history of our species.'

A new view

It was long thought that our species, H. sapiens, probably appeared in east Africa about 200,000 years ago. Alternatively, some archaeologists argued from cultural evidence that our species had originated in southern Africa.

But in 2002, Chris Stringer, a Museum expert and co-author of the new paper, argued that our African origins might be 'multiregional', with different regions of Africa playing a part at different times.

Key research that supported this view was published in 2017. Early H. sapiens fossils from Morocco were analysed and dated at 315,000 years old - far older than other fossils identified for our species.

The fossils were found alongside tools of the Middle Stone Age, a cultural phase normally associated with much younger fossils of H. sapiens.

It demonstrated that northwest Africa must also have been important in the early evolution of our species.