I am not an expert in human prehistory, and I remember reading this account as being speculative the last time I looked into it, so take the following with a grain of salt. That said, it seems that several features of modern humans evolved separately in different environments- color vision in the jungles to identify fruits, standing upright (which led to more useful hands) in the savannah, easy access to micronutrients useful for brain development along rivers and the coast. So if a planet has savannahs and coastline and jungles, but not next to each other like they were in Eastern Africa during the relevant timeframe, then the path that we took is blocked (or, at least, harder to follow).

But how easy are alternate paths, and how likely is a habitable planet to support at least one pathway like that? I don't have the expertise to guess well.