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Ancestral Home Of Human Beings Discovered By Scientists
ANCESTRAL HOME OF HUMAN BEINGS DISCOVERED BY SCIENTISTS
After years of attempting to determine the origin of human life, scientists think they have found the ancestral home of humans. Even with the amazing strides science has made in understanding evolution and how we got here on Earth, there is still a great deal we don't know about human life.
However, Australian scientists have provoked controversy after using DNA to offer hints about the origins of humans. Geneticist Professor Vanessa Hayes and her colleagues examined 1,217 samples of mitochondrial DNA inherited from mothers to children at the Garvan Institute of Medical Research in Sydney.
According to Hayes, "We have known for a long time that modern humans originated in Africa and roughly 200,000 years ago." The DNA was taken from people who lived in southern Africa.
"What we hadn't known until this study was where exactly" humans came from, Hayes explained.
When Hayes and her team used the DNA to trace the oldest human maternal line, they discovered that it pointed to an "ancestral home" that extends from Namibia through Botswana and Zimbabwe.
Using geological, archaeological, and fossil evidence, the team was able to pinpoint this even more precisely, locating a body of water that would have been the largest lake in Africa's history.
It would have been extremely lush and would have offered a suitable habitat for both modern humans and wildlife to have lived, according to Hayes. Situated just south of the Zambezi River, the body of water is thought to have supported human life for 70,000 years.
The results, which were published in the journal Nature, had been questioned despite this.
"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," said Chris Stringer, a researcher at the Natural History Museum in London who specializes in human origins, as reported by The Guardian.
"Once other data are taken into account, it cannot fully capture the complexity of our mosaic origins, like so many studies that focus on one small portion of the genome, one region, one stone tool industry, or one 'critical' fossil."
Sarah Tishkoff, a geneticist at the University of Pennsylvania, added: "On the basis of patterns of variation in contemporary populations, conclusions regarding the geographic origin of modern humans in Africa cannot be drawn. Humans migrate over great distances, which explains this.
"They have migrated throughout Africa in both the recent and ancient past, as well as out of Africa and around the world in the last 80,000 years."