For a very long time, science has thought that humans first evolved in sub-Saharan Africa and then spread throughout the world. The main reason for this is that the oldest human-like fossils have been found in Africa. Everywhere else, the oldest fossils are Neanderthal or modern humans. There are exceptions, like homo floresiensis, found in Indonesia. This is the one they called the “hobbit” because it was so small. This is believed to be an archaic human that migrated out of Africa 2 million years ago.
That’s the dominant narrative for how humans came to populate just about every nook and cranny of the earth. Recent genetic studies go a long way toward confirming the flow of humans around the world. It’s not “settled science”, if such a thing could exist, but it is the foundation from which scientists works when examining the fossil record. When a new find turns up, the first instinct is to figure out how it fits into the current model, but that’s not always an easy task.
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