Scientists believe they've discovered the spot where all human life originated

Scientists believe they may have pinpointed the exact spot where all human life originated.

Despite all the progress in our understanding of evolution and how humans came to be, there are still some unanswered questions.

However Professor Vanessa Hayes, a geneticist at the Garvan Institute of Medical Research in Sydney, is seeking to provide answers.

Her team analysed 1,217 samples of mitochondrial DNA, which is passed down from mother to child.

The DNA originated from people living in southern Africa. Hayes noted: “We have known for a long time that modern humans originated in Africa and roughly 200,000 years ago but what we hadn’t known until this study was where exactly."

The team used the DNA to trace the oldest maternal line of humans and found it traced back to an “ancestral home” that spread from Namibia across Botswana and into Zimbabwe.

They were able to pinpoint the ancestral home of humans even further by using geological, archaeological and fossil evidence. The area would have been located south of the Zambezi river and it could have sustained human life for 70,000 years.

“It would have been very lush and it would have provided a suitable habitat for modern humans and wildlife to have lived,” Hayes explained.

However the conclusions from the study have raised questions and doubts among other experts.

The researchers analysed mitochondrial DNA / Photo by National Cancer Institute on Unsplash

Sarah Tishkoff, a geneticist at the University of Pennsylvania, told The Guardian: “How can they know that there aren’t old lineages in other regions if they’re not included in the study?

“It is not possible to make inferences about the geographical origin of modern humans in Africa based solely on patterns of variation in modern populations. This is because humans migrate over long distances. They migrated out of Africa and across the globe within the past 80,000 years and they have migrated across Africa in the recent and ancient past.”

Chris Stringer, who studies human origins at the Natural History Museum in London, added: “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.

“Like so many studies that concentrate on one small bit of the genome, or one region, or one stone tool industry, or one ‘critical’ fossil, it cannot capture the full complexity of our mosaic origins, once other data are considered.”

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