Multiregional Origin of Modern Humans

The multiregional origin of modern humans is a model of human evolution proposing that modern Homo sapiens developed through a long period of continuous evolution and interbreeding among archaic human populations across Africa, Europe and Asia, rather than emerging solely in Africa before dispersing. The model was formulated chiefly by paleoanthropologist Milford Wolpoff beginning in the late 1980s, drawing on regional continuities observed in the fossil record between archaic and modern human skeletal remains on different continents. Genetic evidence gathered since the 1990s, particularly mitochondrial DNA studies, has favored the competing recent African origin model as the dominant explanation, though the multiregional model's core observation of some interbreeding between modern humans and archaic populations such as Neanderthals has found partial support in later ancient DNA research.