text: Derivation from H. erectus The divergence of the lineage that would lead to H. sapiens out of archaic human varieties derived from H. erectus, is estimated as having taken place over 500,000 years ago (marking the split of the H. sapiens lineage from ancestors shared with other known archaic hominins). But the oldest split among modern human populations (such as the Khoisan split from other groups) has been recently dated to between 350,000 and 260,000 years ago, and the earliest known examples of H. sapiens fossils also date to about that period, including the Jebel Irhoud remains from Morocco (ca. 300,000 or 350–280,000 years ago), the Florisbad Skull from South Africa (ca. 259,000 years ago), and the Omo remains from Ethiopia (ca. 195,000, or, as more recently dated, ca. 233,000 years ago).
  An mtDNA study in 2019 proposed an origin of modern humans in Botswana (and a Khoisan split) of around 200,000 years. However, this proposal has been widely criticized by scholars, with the recent evidence overall (genetic, fossil, and archaeological) supporting an origin for H. sapiens approximately 100,000 years earlier and in a broader region of Africa than the study proposes.
  In September 2019, scientists proposed that the earliest H. sapiens (and last common human ancestor to modern humans) arose between 350,000 and 260,000 years ago through a merging of populations in East and South Africa.
  An alternative suggestion defines H. sapiens cladistically as including the lineage of modern humans since the split from the lineage of Neanderthals, roughly 500,000 to 800,000 years ago.