Scientists in Sydney claim to have found the ancestral home of modern humans in Botswana.
A vast wetlands area that covered most of the current country of Botswana is said to have supported humans 200,000 years ago, sustaining them for another 70,000 years.
The scientists then propose that a shift in the earth’s tilt and orbit brought rains to other parts of the continent, allowing humans to move on to new areas.
Chris Stringer, who studies human origins at the Natural History Museum in London, is not convinced, saying “I’m definitely cautious about using modern genetic distributions to infer exactly where ancestral populations were living 200,000 years ago, particularly in a continent as large and complex as Africa”.