Yes this was all peer-reviewed by experts globally.
See the fossil evidence challenges some assumptions but does not outright tries to go against the Out of Africa model, it only highlights that human evolution was likely more intricate than we previously thought.
This finding shows us that human evolution is more complex than we thought, it does not try to disprove the Out Of Africa model, consider the Out of Africa model to be out of scope to this discussion.
These are two different things, sure related, but not against each other.
I think people are over-interpreting a single fossil, it's best to keep this finding within the realm of human evolution not origins.
Which is still huge news, it doesn't have to be less huge unless it goes against the OOA theory.
That's always the same argument they use, when called out. But eventually they try to sneak in a "multiregional hypothesis".
Broadly speaking, there are two competing hypotheses on the origin of modern humans: the Out-of-Africa hypothesis and the multiregional hypothesis. Both agree that Homo erectus originated in Africa and expanded to Eurasia about one million years ago, but they differ in explaining the origin of...
www.nature.com
The study of human genetic diversity has added a new layer of evidence to the story of how human beings evolved and migrated on Earth. Many human subpopulations carry distinct markers, and tracing these markers through the generations reveals a genetic tree on which today’s many diverse branches...
www.nature.com
The phylogenetic position of the Yunxian cranium elucidates the origin of Homo longi and the Denisovans
Xiaobo Feng, Qiyu Yin, Feng Gao, Dan Lu, Qin Fang, Yilu Feng, Xuchu Huang, Chen Tan, Hanwen Zhou, Qiang Li, Chi Zhang, Chris Stringer, Xijun Ni
Fig. 1. Reconstruction of the Yunxian 2 cranium in standard views.
(
A to
F) Anterior, posterior, inferior, superior, left, and right views, respectively. Brown color indicates the fossil bone. The zygomatic bone and the tip of the left maxilla, as indicated with dark brown, were grafted and reconstructed by incorporating elements of Yunxian 1. White color indicates the reconstructed parts inferred from the fracture edge and Yunxian 1. Neutral gray indicates the bones crushed and covered by other bones and matrix. Scale bar, 5 cm
Fig. 3. Between-group principal components analysis of the Procrustes superimposed 533 landmarks and semilandmarks for 179 fossil and recent
Homo specimens.
The first two bgPCs are shown, with the reconstruction of Yunxian 2 projected onto the morphospace. The anterior and lateral views of the crania shown at the bottom and left of the bgPC axes represent the shape extremes of bgPC1 and bgPC2. These shape extremes were created on the basis of the mean shape (specimen YNO227) of all specimens analyzed (see supplementary materials for details). Gray lines show the phylogenetic relationships between fossil and recent
Homo specimens, based on the phylogenetic analyses in this study. The relationship between recent specimens is a random tree and is based on the assumption that the recent population is monophyletic.
Fig. 4. Phylogeny and divergence time of the 57 selected fossil operational taxonomic units from the genus
Homo.
The topology of the tree was the majority consensus of the most parsimonious trees from the parsimony analysis in TNT (
34). The divergence time was inferred from the Bayesian tip-dating analysis in MrBayes 3.2 (
35). Branch lengths are proportional to the division age in thousands of years (Ka). Numbers at the internal nodes are the median ages, and the blue bars indicate the 95% highest posterior density interval of the node ages. The red half-brackets on the right indicate the ranges of the Neanderthal, longi, and sapiens clades. The numbers in red highlight the ages of division of the three clades. Yunxian is also highlighted in red.
"The Denisova Cave in the Altai Mountains has yielded fragmentary fossil humans that have been genetically identified as representing a clade distinct from H. sapiens and Neanderthals (21, 22). Analyses of mitochondrial DNA place Denisovans with the Sima de los Huesos fossils and outside the divergence between H. sapiens and Neanderthals (23–25), whereas nuclear genome sequences suggest that Denisovans are a sister group to Neanderthals (25, 26). With only three clades (sapiens, Neanderthals, and Denisovans), both possible phylogenetic relationships, as reflected in the form of a tree topology (Fig. 4), are equally logical and depend on the choice of the rooting point of the tree; it is also possible that analyses of separately inherited mitochondrial and autosomal DNA will give different results. Our parsimony analysis, based on the limited number of informative characters scored for the Denisovans, suggests that Denisovans most likely belong to the longi clade."
Genetic vs Morphological Evidence in Human Evolution (with sources)
Key Points
