“...300,000 years. What were we doing all that time?”
It seems unlikely that we will ever know.
Unlikely now, but 20 years ago no one thought that haplogroups or mtDNA would tell so much about our past.
Then, there are a huge number of anomalies which are dismissed out of hand because they don’t fit the preconceived meme of anthropologists, archeologists and others in the scientific disciplines. So there is hope that things will clear up as long as we don’t regress into idiots