And then there was us

In 1987, the academic conference ‘Origins and Dispersals of Modern Humans: Behavioural and Biological Perspectives’ was held in Cambridge, UK. Subsequently referred to as the ‘Human Revolution’ conference, this meeting brought together the most prominent academics working in the field of human origins, including archaeologists and palaeoanthropologists, as well as the geneticists who had recently published the first significant reconstruction of human evolution from mitochondrial DNA. The conference was particularly notable as the first platform to openly debate the fossil and revolutionary genetic evidence that pertained to two emerging theories of human origins, ‘Multiregionalism’ and ‘Recent African Origin’ – commonly known as ‘Out of Africa’. The importance of this conference was recognized at the time, and as such, BBC Radio 3 commissioned interviews with speakers and participants during the breaks; here we publish these interviews in full. Thirty‐eight years on and the current major theories of human origins still trace back to those discussed at the Human Revolution conference. The article provides a fascinating historical perspective on scientific thought at the time and serves as a reminder of how quickly our current knowledge can be challenged and modified with the discovery of new fossil material or the rapid development of analytical techniques.