"Ancient H. sapiens appear to have been even more physically diverse than the world's populations are today, which doesn’t fit with the idea that they all start

"Ancient H. sapiens appear to have been even more physically diverse than the world's populations are today, which doesn’t fit with the idea that they all started from one small group." I believe that the theory they're supposed to be debunking is not that the old (>300,000 yrs) sapiens population descended from a single regional population. The theory is that by 300k ybp there was a divverse sapiens population in and near Africa. They had a wider range of physical appearance than modern humans. Our ancestors descended from a sub-population of archaic sapiens (before mixing with other homo species). The theory explains why we're so much more homogeneous than very old sapiens who still sometimes exhibited "primitive" (isn't this a truism?) skull shapes and such. We went through a bottleneck at some point. IE, many flavours of sapiens existed. We descend from one of them. The Morocco & Levant sapiens have no descendants.