Does mtDNA alone prove that humans came out of Africa?

You know everything a layman really needs to know about mtDNA and ancestral phylogeny, so I won't bore you with the details. Let's instead look at your alternate hypothesis, involving a disaster.

The problem with that is that disasters leave a lot of evidence that they occurred. Humans also tend to leave a lot of evidence that they existed. If humans first evolved in Asia, you'd expect not only inexplicable haplogroups (groups of populations categorized by single nucleotide polymorphisms) that don't show clear evidence of direct relation to another haplogroup. Further, if there were some sort of "everybody dies!" disaster in Asia, killing off a sustainable group of populations of humans, we would be able to find some trace of their existence prior to the proposed evolution of humans as a species some 200,000 - 500,000 years ago.

We find none of these things. In fact, what we do find is a clear nested hierarchy in extant haplogroups, leading directly back to the San people of Africa. So we can safely conclude that humans got their start in Africa.

And I'd hate to bring up Occam's Razor, but the Africa-origin theory makes almost no assumptions and is founded on strong evidence, while the hypothesis of Asiatic origins followed by migration and a disaster makes too many assumptions to be reasonable. Further, the Asiatic origin hypothesis allows us to make testable predictions, i.e. that we should be unable to trace all haplogroups back to one using objective, statistical analysis of single nucleotide polymorphisms. We can, so we may reject the Asiatic origin hypothesis. That is, not only can it not explain the data, it runs directly counter to the evidence.

All data linked with evolution is circumstantial, yet many human beings have been convicted in a courtroom of regulation & accomplished on some distance much less helping circumstantial data than evolution has. actually technology experts in no way stated the Earth became into flat & a Roman proved it became right into a globe approximately one hundred BC. simply by fact the Bible stated God stopped the sunlight in the sky to permit David to win a conflict, the Church stated the sunlight revolved around the Earth & burned human beings alive for announcing distinctive. simply by fact the Bible stated the 4 corners of the Earth, then the Church stated it became into flat. i'm unlikely to enable you to recognize approximately the two bare babies that a speaking snake confident to eat an apple that made them sensible sufficient to have intercourse and initiate off the human race. that would desire to insult your intelligence.

> Does mtDNA alone prove that humans came out of Africa?

No. It's evidence, not proof. There's also evidence from the fossil record: fossils of anatomically modern man are found in Africa that are 195,000 years old. The oldest Asian fossils of modern man are 110,000 years old.

yes

If you look how things branch is the key.

For example, it is easy to show the migration from Asia into the Americas.

You can keep rewinding the clock to the big branching point in the Mid-East

no