Doesn't seem contradictory to me tbh. If the person in Spain descended from someone who left Sub-Saharan Africa 50k years earlier, they wouldn't necessarily be closely related to a genetically distinct population in North Africa (especially since IIRC there's evidence of people from Eurasia migrating to North Africa, it wasn't a one-way exodus where people left Africa and only expanded outward)
Citation: Some of the oldest human remains ever unearthed are the Omo One bones found in Ethiopia. For decades, their precise age has been debated, but a new study argues they're around 233,000 years old.
It is way more complicated than that. Even within Africa different groups moved around and exchanged with each other, then out of Africa there was intermingling along with returns to Africa and yet more migrations out of Africa.
This is about the the oldest genome that was found in Southern Spain. It's not saying that the oldest genome was found in Spain.
Though, there may be something to what you said with this statement from the article:
"In Malalmuerzo, we found no evidence of a genetic
contribution from North African lineages, and conversely,
there is no evidence of a genetic contribution from
southern Spain in the genomes of the 14,000-year-old
individuals from the Taforalt cave in Morocco," said
Gerd-Christian Weniger from the University of Cologne.
To be clear this is the 'oldest from Southern Spain' at ~23k years old.
The oldest full genomes found are ~45k years old including one in Czechia (Zlatý kůň), one in Siberia (Ust’-Ishim), one in East Asia (Tianyuan) and one from Romania (Oase 1) [0]
My conjecture is that if I think of the Alboran, Balearic, Ligurian, Tyrrhenian, Ionean, Adriatic, Mediterranean, and Aegean seas as a single body of water, humans just kept going around it in clock- & counter-clockwise wise, over and over. Or maybe in an infinity symbol (∞) fashion, crossing at Gibraltar, between Al Huwariyah and Marsala, and of course at the Sea of Marmara or even the Greek isles.
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[ 1.6 ms ] story [ 64.0 ms ] thread[citation needed]. We have human bones from outside of Africa that predate this. Some of the oldest are found in the Middle East/Caucasus.
https://www.npr.org/2022/01/13/1072867405/scientists-determi...
Though, there may be something to what you said with this statement from the article:
The oldest full genomes found are ~45k years old including one in Czechia (Zlatý kůň), one in Siberia (Ust’-Ishim), one in East Asia (Tianyuan) and one from Romania (Oase 1) [0]
[0] https://www.nature.com/articles/s41559-021-01443-x