What is left of it
The African origin story is four observations held together by a narrative of ascent.
Remove the ascent and they stop being a story. They become four separate facts, each of which supports considerably less than it is asked to.
The four
Our species arose in Africa around three hundred thousand years ago and spread out from there. That is the accepted account, and four findings are given in support of it.
Each of those findings is real. Here is what each one measures, and what follows from it.
Africa holds the most genetic variation.
Two people picked at random differ at about one DNA letter in a thousand. Pick both from Africa and the figure is higher. Pick both from Europe or Asia and it is lower.
And the variants found outside Africa are mostly variants that also occur inside it. Africa additionally holds a large number that occur nowhere else.
Here is the mechanism that produces those two facts. Mutations arrive at a steady rate, so a population accumulates variants in proportion to how many people it holds and how long it has been holding them. When a group splits off and moves away, it carries whatever variants happened to be in the people who left, which is a sample of what the parent population had.
So the measurement tells you that the African population has been larger, or older, or both, than the populations outside it, and that the populations outside it descend from a group that departed carrying a sample.
Africa as the place of origin accounts for that. Africa as a continent that simply held more people for longer accounts for it equally, with the departure happening at any point in a much longer occupation.
The female and male lines converge on African ancestors.
The mechanism is in the Eve and Adam chapter. Mitochondrial lines can only be lost, never created, so their number falls to one wherever a population sits and however large it is. The convergence point marks the last survivor of that process.
What the measurement gives is a date and a place for that survivor. The population she belonged to contained thousands of others, whose descendants are equally ours.
The oldest skulls of our shape are African. Jebel Irhoud in Morocco at three hundred thousand years, Omo in Ethiopia at a hundred and ninety-five thousand.
Two things put them there.
Bone survives where the ground is dry and alkaline, and where sediment covers a body quickly. East and North African conditions do both. Wet ground, acid soil and forest floor dissolve bone within decades, and that covers most of the tropics and most of Asia.
And the searching has been concentrated in Africa for a century. Darwin argued in 1871 that our origins would be found there, because our closest living relatives are there. Expeditions, funding and careers followed that argument, and they are still following it.
So the oldest skulls come from the ground that keeps bone and from the continent where the money went.
Non-Africans carry Neanderthal DNA and Africans carry very little. Between one and two percent outside Africa, and under half a percent inside it.
The mechanism is straightforward. Neanderthal DNA enters a person's genome when a Neanderthal is among that person's ancestors, and the fragments are passed down and cut shorter each generation. A population with Neanderthals in its ancestry carries the fragments. A population without them carries none.
So the distribution tells you where the meeting happened. Our ancestors and the Neanderthals had children together somewhere outside Africa, in the Middle East on the current reading, around fifty thousand years ago.
That fixes the location of a meeting. Where each of the two peoples had been before they met is a separate question, and other evidence answers it.
What the four support together
Something happened in Africa and the Middle East, somewhere between three hundred thousand and two hundred thousand years ago, involving a population that passed through a narrow point.
The esoteric sources give the same window and the same region. Sitchin places the Anunnaki work in Mesopotamia, with the mines in southern Africa. Bashar names the Middle East and Africa. The date given for the making is around two hundred and fifty thousand years.
So both accounts put the event in the same place at the same time. What each says happened there is different.
On the mainstream account a population changed. Variants accumulated in an existing hominin population, generation by generation, under ordinary selection, across hundreds of thousands of years. The narrow point is a bottleneck: a period when numbers fell, through climate or disease or the departure of a small group, and the survivors carried a reduced sample forward.
On the esoteric account a population was made. Local hominin stock was taken and worked on, with genetic material added from elsewhere, over a short period.
The narrow point is the founding group of that new line, and it was small for a practical reason. Genetic engineering is laborious. Whoever is doing it works on as few individuals as the job allows, gets a viable line, and breeds from that. Everything afterward descends from the handful that were actually worked on.
And those two histories leave different marks. Accumulation spreads changes across time, each one arriving separately, each with a precursor in an earlier population. Construction puts changes in together, at one moment, and some of them have no precursor anywhere.
Which is a thing that can be looked for in the sequences.