Stripping the Hegemony of Time: Piercing the Epistemological Bubble of the "Single African Origin"

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.