
Perhaps you saw the headlines last week about a research paper that claimed to locate the origins of modern humans in a region of what is now Botswana. Many outlets reported the conclusions as stated in the paper. Some coverage, like this BBC article, acknowledges skepticism but not necessarily in great detail. More specifically, the claim is that our collective ancestors first became Homo sapiens in an area centered in modern Botswana from around 200,000 years ago until 130,000 years ago when they began migrating outward. This conclusion is based on analysis of mitochondrial sequence data, linguistics and simulations of the climate in the region over the past few hundred millenia. The biggest challenge to the claim is fossil evidence of anatomically modern humans in eastern Africa but there are other questions as well.
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