The origin of modern humans is one of the most widely debated concerns in the area of ​​paleoanthropology. Since the discovery of Neanderthals in the mid-1800s, scientists such as Charles Darwin and many others have been extremely curious about man's resemblance to some great apes and how over long periods of time they evolved from different forms archaic of human beings up to today's homo sapiens. There are two main theories that understand how modern humans may have evolved from the various hominid groups that existed in the Old World. These two theories are the multiregional origin theory and the “out of Africa” origin theory. I will first introduce the context and rationale behind the two theories, then argue, with the support of genetic evidence, why the “Out of Africa” theory is currently the most widely accepted in the field. The multiregional hypothesis was originally proposed in 1984 by Milford H. Wolpoff, Alan Thorne, and Xinzhi Wu. The theory indicates that the worldwide expansion of modern humans arose from a series of regionally distinct phases of human evolution that physically replaced Old World humans over thousands of years (Wolpoff et al. 1984) . According to the theory, about half of the Homo erectus native to Africa split and migrated to Europe, Asia and Australia. These regional populations slowly, over time, evolved separately into different forms of archaic humans and then eventually evolved into regionally diverse modern humans. The multiregional theory was once the favored hypothesis for the origin of modern humans. Proponents of the hypothesis have argued that human traits show continuity over time. They argue that early modern humans exhibit some traits consistent with a ... middle of paper ...... of modern human populations, suggesting that our origins may reflect a relatively small founder population for Homo sapiens. mtDNA analysis (Rogers and Harpending 1992) supports the hypothesis that a small population of Homo sapiens, perhaps numbering only 10,000 to 50,000 individuals, left Africa between 50,000 and 100,000 years ago. There is another similarity between human populations that stands in stark contrast to the condition observed in our closest living relatives, the chimpanzees. In fact, there is significantly more genetic variation between two individual chimpanzees drawn from the same population than between two humans drawn randomly from a single population. Furthermore, the genetic variation among chimpanzee populations is enormously greater than the differences among European, Asian, and African human populations (Cavalli-Sforza, 2000).