Before about 48,000 bce human history was African history.

It was in the African continent that the evolution of the fully modern human ancestors of all of us alive today took place. Some of the technological and cultural features present among early fully modern humans had come by stages into being among more archaic humans in the eras preceding 70,000 bce, but the full package of modern human capacities took shape between about 70,000 and 48,000 bce.

Those of our fully modern ancestors who left Africa in those times moved into regions where other, more archaic hominin species had long lived - Neanderthals in the Middle East and Europe, and Denisovans and probably others in Asia. Those other hominins did not simply disappear; they persisted for thousands of years longer, only gradually losing out to our fully modern human ancestors in the competition for food and resources. Neanderthals survived in various refugia, such as the Iberian peninsula in the far west and Ural mountains in the north, for perhaps another 15,000 years before finally becoming extinct. Denisovans probably persisted as well for thousand of years before dying out. Other archaic hominins survived for thousands more years in East and Southeast Asia.^[414]

Some few cases of interbreeding took place as well. A small Neanderthal component can be identified in the ancestry of all the modern human populations whose ancestors moved outward from Africa, reflecting the presence of Neanderthals in the southwestern areas of Asia through which this initial dispersal passed. A similarly small Denisovan component occurs among the descendants of the first fully human settlers of island South Asia and Australia.^[415] Those of our fully modern human ancestors who remained in our common African homeland passed through similar histories of encounter with more archaic hominins.

But notable differences characterized the encounter in Africa. In particular, the archaic populations there were genetically closer related to fully modern humans. These archaic humans are often called “anatomically modern humans,” as if they were no different from us today, but that label is misleading. Their skull shapes maintained features lost in all modern humans,^[417] and in those cases where skeletal evidence of their throat structure exists, it seems that they also did not yet possess a fully modern vocal tract.^[418] They were archaic in their tool-making capacities and apparently in their linguistic and social capacities, but they diverged out of the same ancestral archaic human stock as our own fully modern human ancestors. They belonged either to our own line of descent or to closely related sister lines of descent. In all likelihood they shared more capacities with us than the Neanderthals and Denisovans of Eurasia whose ancestors, in contrast, had diverged from our line of descent and moved out of Africa much earlier, as much as 500,000 years ago.

That closer relationship between archaic and fully modern humans in Africa had consequences for how their encounters played in the long period from 70,000 to 12,500 bce, as we shall see. In some areas separate archaic and fully modern human populations appear to have persisted for thousands of years after 48,000 bce, utilizing different but nearby environments, or making different use of the same environments. In other regions the makers of Middle Stone Age cultures remained the predominant populations down nearly to the end of the last ice age. In some cases late-persisting Middle Stone Age populations may have sought to compete by imitating and adding features of Later Stone Age tool making to their existing toolkits. Scholars have often called these “transitional” industries, and they were transitional in the sense of having blended Later Stone Age features into an otherwise Middle Stone Age industry. But these phenomena belong to periods after 30,000 BCE, far too late in time to be part of the original evolutionary transition from the Middle to the Later Stone Age in Africa.