The current consensus is that we all come out of Africa.
My hymn-sheet is a recent North-West European edition, translated out of the original ‘African’. Think of me as a tribute band!
The text has, allegedly, two points of origin – mt-Eve and Y-Adam[9] : the former somewhere around what is currently labelled (by some at least) Lake Victoria about 200,000 years ago, the latter hails from somewhere around 21st century Lagos: but, of course, there is a chicken & egg thing going on here, not least underlined by the long-distance dating thing.
In that time frame, I have come a long way, through a process of ‘continental drift’: eating and breeding (and sometimes killing) my way up through Africa, Asia Minor and into Europe[10]. Ingesting everything along the way. Passing-on half of everything each time I conceive[11], as I have conceived over and over through every one of my billions of grandmothers[12]
Imagine! Those tens of billions of couplings: sometimes lustful, sometimes loving, too often violent.