Modern Humans Origin Tracked Back To Botswana, According To Study. Humans have been discovered to have originated from Africa.
Humans have been discovered to have originated from Africa. However, there was no exact location of where exactly in Africa the modern human originated. A new study found the exact location of where the modern human originated. It was tracked back to Botswana, on the south of the Zambezi river, 200 000 years ago.
It is stated that the ancestors lived in the area for 70 000 years but then moved because of the climate change, according to the examiners. They started moving to fertile areas, which opened the way for future migrations to places outside of Africa. Professor Vanessa Hayes, a geneticist at the Garvan Institute of Medical Research in Australia, states that the exact location of the earliest ancestors has been long been debated.
“It has been clear for some time that anatomically modern humans appeared in Africa roughly 200 000 years ago. What has been long debated is the exact location of this emergence and subsequent dispersal of our earliest ancestors,” says Professor Vanessa Hayes. The examiners believe that the ancestors lived near the lake system, known as Lake Makgadikgadi. Professor Vanessa Hayes says, “It’s an extremely large area. It would have been very wet, it would have been very lush. And it would have actually provided a suitable habitat for modern humans and wildlife to have to have lived.”It was stated that there were three waves of migration 110 000 and 130 000 years ago. The first wave of migrants moved to the north-east. They were thus followed by the second wave which moved through the south-west, the third wave stayed in Botswana till this day.
The sequences of events are based on looking back at the humn family tree using multiple samples of mitochondrial DNA from living Africans. Mixing genetics with cclimate computer model simulations and geology, researchers were able to get some form of picture of what the continent was like 200 000 years ago. Prof Chris Stringer of the Natural History Museum told BBC News that, “You can’t use modern mitochondrial distributions on their own to reconstruct a single location for modern human origins. I think it’s over-reaching the data because you’re only looking at one tiny part of the genome so it cannot give you the whole story of our origins.” This means there might be other areas of origin.
by Alexandra Ramaite
