By 1992, the study was largely discredited. But the techniques of genetic analysis continued to be refined, and in 1997 scientists from the University of Munich managed to extract and analyze some DNA from the arm bone of the original Neandertal man, and this time the evidence stood up. The Munich study found that the Neandertal DNA was unlike any DNA found on Earth now, strongly indicating that there was no genetic connection between Neandertals and modern humans. Now this really was a blow to multiregionalism.

Then in late 2000 Nature and other publications reported on a Swedish study of the mitochondrial DNA of fifty-three people, which suggested that all modern humans emerged from Africa within the past 100,000 years and came from a breeding stock of no more than 10,000 individuals. Soon afterward, Eric Lander, director of the Whitehead Institute/Massachusetts Institute of Technology Center for Genome Research, announced that modern Europeans, and perhaps people farther afield, are descended from "no more than a few hundred Africans who left their homeland as recently as 25,000 years ago."