I don't think a group of people living somewhere for thousands of years would be "getting it wrong." You're embedding an assumption that evolution has been working toward an end goal of getting humans to spread globally, which isn't how evolution works.
It doesn't seem all that improbable that humans or close ancestors had colonized other parts of the world for thousands of years only to die off due to climate change/disease/other factors about 40,000 years ago when they had to start all over again. Or maybe the ancestors colonized it and the extinction event was Homo Sapiens out of Africa, although in this case you would expect more DNA mixing. It seems more likely that the ancestors died out for whatever reason and the humans moved into their habitats to refill that ecological niche.
I don't see how you could say that's more likely without evidence, lack significant gaps in archaelogical finds between eras of human presence in a region.
