> For some broader context missing from the article, there's been a long-running "controversy" with certain people in the Chinese Academy of Sciences making an argument called the multiregional hypothesis that modern Chinese evolved in China out of archaic hominins.

It is appealing because it justifies racism. It is just the contemporary version of polygenism of racial science.

That said, even if human evolution is more complex than simple out of Africa, all of humanity has a lot of shared ancestry and genetics do not support the concept of race.