Did Modern Man ( Homo Sapiens Sapiens) appear 200,00 years ago or only 60,000

[PhilA]

years ago ? wiki says 200,000 years
National Geographic says 60,000 years
Or is it that although man has been around much longer, we are only decended from one individual who lived 60,000 years ago and some of his decendents began leaving Africa to start populating the rest of the world about 50,000 years ago ?

 

[bravozulu]

We didn't really just appear. The oldest fossils that also fall into the range of modern humans are called anatomically modern humans and they are about 200,000 years old. The 60,000 years is a very common estimate when some modern humans left Africa. All humans share a female common ancestor called mitochondrial Eve. The estimated time when she lived varies. She wasn't the only person living at the time that we share nuclear DNA with nor was she the last common ancestor of all people. She just has the mutations on her mitochondrial DNA that we all inherited. She was otherwise a completely normal person and you wouldn't be able to pick her out of the population. Those kinds of mutations on the mitochondrial DNA don't express themselves as anything.