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The multiregional hypothesis, multiregional evolution (MRE), or polycentric hypothesis, is a scientific model that provides an alternative explanation to the more widely accepted "Out of Africa" model of monogenesis for the pattern of human evolution.
Milford Howell Wolpoff is a paleoanthropologist and professor of anthropology at the University of Michigan and its museum of Anthropology. He is the leading proponent of the multiregional evolution hypothesis that explains the evolution of Homo sapiens as a consequence of evolutionary processes and gene flow across continents within a single species.
Weidenreich pioneered the Polycentric (multiregional) hypothesis, which proposed that human populations have evolved independently in the Old World from Homo erectus to Homo sapiens sapiens, while at the same time there was gene flow between the various populations.
The hypothesis necessarily rejects the assumption of an infertility barrier between ancient Eurasian and African populations of Homo. The hypothesis was controversially debated during the late 1980s and the 1990s. [119] The now-current terminology of "recent-origin" and "Out of Africa" became current in the context of this debate in the 1990s ...
The hypothesis that there has been archaic line in the ancestry of present-day Africans that originated before the San, Pygmies and East African hunter gatherers (and the Eurasians) is supported by a line of evidence independent from the Skoglund findings based on long haplotypes with deep divergences from other human haplotypes including ...
The peoples of Africa are characterized by regional genetic substructure and heterogeneity, depending on the respective ethno-linguistic identity, and, in part, explainable by the "multiregional evolution" of modern human lineages in various multiple regions of the African continent, as well as later admixture events, including back-migrations ...
Wolpoff and Caspari's "Race and Human Evolution" indexes "Multiregional evolution: definition of" to page 32, where a description in italics preceded by "In a nutshell, the theory is that" occupies about 60% of the page. It does not specify any lower limit for genetic contribution from archaic Eurasian Homo in order for the theory to be valid.
At this point in time, the Out of Africa hypothesis (that humans evolved in and dispersed out of Africa) was overturning the Out of Asia and multiregional hypotheses. In Western thought, Peking Man moved from the centre of human origins to a dead offshoot, while Chinese palaeoanthropologists repurposed the multiregional hypothesis wherein local ...