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It is widely accepted that the human race originated from Africa - likely from a single ancestral population. However, a new Oxford University research collaboration has challenged this perception of evolution, suggesting that instead of one group growing from a specific region in Africa, our ancestors lived across the entire continent, and as a result, people were diverse both physically and culturally, from the very beginning. Led by Dr. Eleanor Scerri of the University of Oxford and the Max Planck Institute for the Science of Human History, the study, found that not only were humans scattered across Africa, but, due to a combination of diverse habitats and shifting environmental boundaries, such as forests and deserts, they did not really interact and were largely kept apart. As a result of this separation - which spanned more than a thousand years - the human species diversified and ultimately, this mixing of groups shaped the future of our species as we know it. The research, published in Trends Ecology & Evolution , combines the study of bones (anthropology), stones (archaeology) and genes (population genetics) with detailed reconstructions of the changing African continent's climate and general habitat, to build a different picture of our evolution over the last 300,000 years. African skull from around 300,000 years ago Right: Skull from the Levant dating from around 95,000 years ago.