The Strong Single African Origin (SSAO) paradigm, which posits an exclusive African emergence of Homo sapiens (~200–300 ka) followed by total Eurasian demographic replacement, currently functions not merely as a scientific hypothesis but as an epistemological monopoly over human evolutionary chronology. This paper conducts a systematic methodological deconstruction of the scaffolding sustaining this paradigm. It identifies four foundational vulnerabilities: (1)the illusion of retroactive precision in molecular clock dating extrapolated from deep-time calibrations; (2)the institutional elevation of tropical DNA degradation into an unfalsifiable, self-sealing immunity clause; (3)the asymmetric epistemic burden imposed on Eurasian fossils through temporal tyranny and a priori ancestral status denial; (4)the category errors embedded in three standard institutional counter-arguments. By dismantling the paradigm’s self-granted privilege of defining evolutionary chronology, this critique argues for restoring morphological, molecular, and stratigraphic evidence to equal epistemological standing, and for replacing replacement dogmatism with complex assimilation models.
Jing Zhang (Mon,) studied this question.