Ok, first of all, PloS One, while a useful journal, is not a traditional journal. This is partly why these researchers are able to get away with speculative cla

Ok, first of all, PloS One, while a useful journal, is not a traditional journal. This is partly why these researchers are able to get away with speculative claims. Let's go back to fundamentals. Humans are closely related to Chimpanzees, Bonobos, and Gorillas. The ancestral Chimp-Bonobo-Human likely first diverged from Gorillas (by such a small margin that it's still debated). Then about 6 million years ago the (Chimp-Bonobo)-Human split happened. In fact after the split, about 1.5m in, more interbreeding likely happened. Chimps & Bonobos split about 1 million years ago. We're thus as closely related to Bonobos as we are to Chimps! Since we currently have humans in Europe, Asia, Americas etc. (obviously); we know that at some point our ancestors travelled out of Africa. However, so did other hominids. This very likely happened multiple times. This started happening immediately after the split, and kept continuing. Again nothing new here: Many animals travel across continents, diverge, etc. I expect we'll continue finding many side branches of various hominids, great apes, and monkeys all over the place. However, those are not our ancestors. In particular, Homo Sapiens itself travelled out of Africa relatively recently, and encountered others that it sometimes interbred with, sometimes wiped out; including Neandertals, Denisovans etc. We do have DNA from Neandertals and Denisovan, which you can track by sequencing the genome of bones. But either way, big picture, we split from the other Great Apes, and migrated out of Africa in waves, the most recent and dominant one being the Migration of Homo Sapiens; which is by far, genetically, our dominant ancestor. Homo Sapiens evolved in Africa and migrated out. Let's analyze this at a deeper level: "Europe was the birthplace of mankind, not Africa" is a deeply problematic statement. We can first examine what we mean by "birthplace of mankind". A lot of early hominid species, either in Africa or elsewhere did not acquire any of the characteristics we associate as "human", for millions of years. Certainly not 6+ million years ago. Given we all seem to agree that we diverged from Great Apes, initially, in Africa, we seem to mean something else by "birthplace of mankind", potentially involving higher cognitive abilities, ability for language, imagination, larger social groups etc. In particular, any suggestion for this leap to happen outside of Africa garners great popular attention compared to other scientific advances in this field. If you dig down deep enough, I've found that this is because it often supports peoples nation-creation myths and beliefs about "races". There is zero evidence that this particular remain had any capacity for language, thought, or anything remotely resembling human - very normal given ~6m year difference. Homo Sapiens did evolve a large brain, language, imagination, and an ability to organize -- in Africa. That makes Africa the birthplace of mankind, both symbolically, metaphorically, and literally.