Botswana is humanity’s ancestral home, claims major study – well, actually …
A recent paper in the prestigious journal Nature claims to show that modern humans originated about 200,000 years ago in the region around northern Botswana . For a scientist like myself who studies human origins, this is exciting news. If correct, this paper would suggest that we finally know where our species comes from. But there are actually several reasons why I and some of my colleagues are not entirely convinced. In fact, there’s good reason to believe that our species doesn’t even have a single origin. The scientists behind the new research studied genetic data from many individuals from the KhoeSan peoples of southern Africa, who are thought to live where their ancestors have lived for hundreds of thousands of years. The researchers used their new data together with existing information about people all around the world (including other areas traditionally associated with the origins of humankind) to reconstruct in detail the branching of the human family tree. We can thi...