New Spot for the Origins of Modern Humans: Botswana

One thing is consistent in the study of the origins of modern humans: there isn’t any.  What National Geographic calls a “controversial” new study pinpoints the origins of our line in Botswana:

A powdery white layer blankets the desiccated landscape of Botswana’s Makgadikgadi pans, one of the world’s largest salt flats. But some 200,000 years ago, this blank canvas would have been painted in the blues and greens of a flourishing wetland. Set in the middle of a harsh desert in southern Africa, the lush landscape would have been an appealing place for early humans to call home.

Now, a controversial new study in Nature argues that this oasis, known as the Makgadikgadi–Okavango wetland, was not just any home, but the ancestral “homeland” for all modern humans today. The researchers studied mitochondrial DNA—genetic material stored in the powerhouse of our cells that is passed from mother to child—of current residents across southern Africa. Then they layered the genetic data with an analysis of past climate and modern linguistics, as well as cultural and geographic distributions of local populations.

We’ve seen this play before.  The Nature article is an odd one.  It purports to examine the origins of modern humans using mitochondrial DNA evidence but then goes out of its way to not mention ANY of the fossil evidence that does not fit the hypothesis constructed in the paper.  How did the editors of Nature let that get by?  There is no mention of either the East African Bouri or the Northwest African Jebel Irhoud sites in this paper.  The Bouri site contains the Herto remains that are demonstrably modern human at 160 thousand and the Jebel Irhoud remains, which date to around 315 thousand exhibit modern facial characteristics.  The 180 thousand year-old East African Omo remains are only mentioned in passing and then, not by name.