ABOVE: NASA/JPL/NIMA
The first modern humans lived about 200,000 years ago in Africa south of the Zambezi River, researchers reported today (October 28) in Nature. The conclusion, reached through analyses of mitochondrial DNA, historic climate estimates, geography, and other factors, helps pinpoint the long-debated geographic origins of our ancestors, but is not without its skeptics.
“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,” Chris Stringer, who studies human origins at the Natural History Museum in London and was not involved in the study, tells The Guardian. “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.”
An international team of researchers analyzed the mitochondrial ...
