Honestly, innonimatu, I do think you're fighting a lonely battle on this. The "out of Africa" theory remains the most popular theory of human origins among paleoanthropologists today, so your continued insistence that it's dying out isn’t realistic. You keep on linking to articles that you claim undermine it when they don't at all. This is because, among other things, that theory does not state that, after Homo sapiens spread out of Africa, they completely replaced other humans and did not interbreed with them. You seem to think that it does, but it does not. It only states that Homo sapiens were already Homo sapiens before they left Africa. That is perfectly compatible with their interbreeding with other kinds of human after that point and with the continued presence of Neanderthal (or other) DNA in our genome.
Akey states explicitly that Homo sapiens were physically modern humans before they began interacting with Neanderthals. That is a clear endorsement of the "out of Africa" theory. There is no suggestion there whatsoever that the interaction with Neanderthals was one of the things that made Homo sapiens into physically modern humans. But that is what you would need for this to be a rejection of "out of Africa".
The out of africa theory (and to be clear, even if I think we all who have been discussing it know it: it is about the emergence and spread of homo sapiens, not the far more ancient migrations) insisted on a "great replacement", with the extinction of all other branches of hominids, which got
replaced in a great migration.
This latest evidence points in a completely opposite way: the migrations kept happening for hundreds of thousands of years, with mixing of populations ongoing all that time. Which, evidently, would happen not just "out of Africa" but also
into Africa. There was never any reason to suppose that continent, much less a region of it, nearly isolated for tens or hundreds of thousands of years. It is an offence to common sense.
My point is that the two vast landmasses of the "old world", Eurasia and Africa, have been interconnected during the whole two millions years of human evolution. Not just the land connection, the Mediterranean was not a hard barrier.
There was no barrier to populations mixing, even it it took a group a couple of centuries to travel some thounsands of kilometers. The "one great migration" theory never made any sense. Nor does it make sense that homo sapiens evolved in any one smal region
isolated and then spread as a "finished product". The spread and mixing must have happened from the beginnings in an ongoing basis, within Africa and to Eurasia also. That some habitats favoured specialized populations (or the specialization of populations) did not made those
separate races other the fast few hundreds of thousands of years, and did not made sucha versatile anumal as humans are unable to move to other regions. If earlier hominids had migrated out of Africa and aspread across Eurasia in prior waves, many hundreds of thousands of years previously, what ever could explain a lack of migration during the development of homo sapiens?
The out of Africa hypothesis was accepted without serious evidence to back it, and was always illogical. Everyone discussing it sould recall its original claims, because as those fell the people who invested their reputation into the theory have been moving the claims. But, dishonestly, refusing to repudiate the whole thing and admit the mistake. The original claim was a "great replacement" around 60 thousand years ago, and the extermination of all other populations in its path. Anyone saying of that postulated migration "but they could have interbred" was regarded as a crank and shunned. In this century lost of genetic material has finally forced the acceptance of the "admistuce hipothsis". Whatr this group points out, typical homo sapiens genetic material in neanderthals, shows that the mixing happened, and happened much, much before the dates claimed by the out of Africa theorists for the great migration they postulated. Changing the goalposts, after evidence of intermixing became undeniable (with genetics, the skeletal evidence had been dismissed and its presenters defamed), the claim for the out of Africa replacemente with homo sapiens was shifted to some 200 thousand years ago. That does not get a pass. The theory has been falsified. What you are trying to excuse is the equivalent of people putting epicycles on the geocentric model of the solar system.
The very idea that homo sapiens is a fundamentally distinct branch of mankind (or rather, that the claimed extinct branches that in fact merged into what are now "modern humans" were fundamentally different) cannot stand in face of the evidence of intermixing. Contrary to what
@Birdjaguar says, it is the out of Africa theory that was born of an era of racist scientists to whom different "races" of humans were backwards or modern, with the modern necessarily exterminating the backwards. They were, as were almost all "cultured men" even past the mid 20th century,
infected with eugenics and its worldview of competition and extermination.
This is a puzzle still with many missing pieces. And this evidence, like previous genetic evidence, involves statistical inference. I'm aware that there is no fenitoive proof to say "human evolution went like this", But there is sufficient proof to say "that theory was wrong".
