I've been trying to follow the developing human origin story (as a layman) for while now. It's hard to overstate the importance of the elephant in the room here, which is race and variation within the human species. There was a huge movement, especially post-WW2, to scientifically "want" to find that all humans were the same and therefore "equal"

The Out-of-Africa narrative has to be understood in this context, that it is a very positive narrative, that humans-as-humans developed just once in this tiny spot in Africa and then spread out around the world very recently, never interbred with other hominid species so they're all gone, and therefore we're all pretty much exactly the same.

What has been emerging especially now that genetic sequencing is becoming rapidly cheaper and more advanced at picking human genomes out of the genetic diaspora found in old fossils, is a much more complicated picture. The Chinese obviously have little need to adhere to US political correctness, so they're beginning to push the evidence that Asian hominid genes contributed to the emergence of modern humans/civilization.

The emerging picture to me is one of multiple waves of hominin advances spreading in a varied way and admixing with existing local populations. So there's pretty clearly an ancient Out-of-Africa wave of homo erectus(who were far more advanced than previously acknowledged), a possible evolution of "homo erectus+" and wave out of Asia, and likely an "Out of Arabia" mix of neanderthals and AMHs in the Levant, all of which intermixed imperfectly. The Neanderthals themselves look plausibly responsible for some advances in human civilization (Mousterians)

What you wind up with is a far more complex picture of human evolution and far more significant and long-standing difference between human populations, which I think requires a new narrative and philosophy for what human equality means and a way to ground it on something more fundamental than a wished-for genetic similarity.