The multiregional model of human evolution has a long history. It was first proposed by Franz Weidenreich (1943)
in relation to his analyses of the Peking Man fossils but has been further developed and promoted in recent years by Milford Wolpoff and Alan Thorne (Wolpoff et al. 1984). The essence of this model is that since the origin of Homo some two million years ago, the human lineage has evolved as a single lineage, without speciation events (Wolpoff and Caspari 1997). Within this lineage there would have been universal directional trends in characters such as brain size, but regional differences in populations would have persisted. Over time, therefore, some specific morphological traits would persist in particular regions, regardless of other global trends; the human lineage thus evolved in several regions (multiregionality). This continuity has been seen to extend to the transition from archaic to modern hominids in Africa, Asia, and Europe, the last of these being the link between Neanderthals and modern Europeans. The multiregional model is therefore largely inconsistent with the general interpretation of the genetic evidence, requiring that the effective population size of the human lineage was always large enough for gene flow to occur globally and that coalescence times for most genes would be in excess of a million years.
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