Out of Africa is a memoir by the Danish author Baroness Karen von Blixen-Finecke. The book, first published in 1937, recounts events of the seventeen years when Blixen made her home in Kenya, then called British East Africa. The book is a lyrical meditation on Blixen’s life on her coffee plantation, as well as a tribute to some of the people who touched her life there. It provides a vivid snapshot of African colonial life in the last decades of the British Empire. Blixen wrote the book in English and then rewrote it in Danish.

In paleoanthropology, the recent African origin of modern humans, or the "out of Africa" theory (OOA), is the most widely accepted model of the geographic origin and early migration of anatomically modern humans. The theory is called the "out-of-Africa" theory in the popular press, and the "recent single-origin hypothesis" (RSOH), "replacement hypothesis", or "recent African origin model" (RAO) by experts in the field. The concept was speculative before it was corroborated in the 1980s by a study of present-day mitochondrial DNA, combined with evidence based on physical anthropology of archaic specimens.