Category: Kalahari

Come visit your ancestral home! Botswana for me, has always felt like home and now it appears that it is much closer to my ancestral home.  Last December I took a group to the Makgadikgadi Pans in Botswana, which now has more meaning to all of us as humans as recent scientific study puts Northern Botswana as the ancestral home of modern humans. Scientists say the possible ancestral home of all humans alive today is an area south of the Zambezi River. Scientists have pinpointed the homeland of all humans alive today to a region south of the Zambezi River. The area is now dominated by salt pans but was once home to an enormous lake, which may have been our ancestral heartland 200,000 years ago. Our ancestors settled for 70,000 years until the local climate changed, researchers have proposed. They began to move on as fertile green corridors opened up, paving the way for future migrations out of Africa. "It has been clear for some time that anatomically modern humans appeared in Africa roughly 200,000 years ago," said Prof Vanessa Hayes, a geneticist at the Garvan Institute of Medical Research in Australia. "What has been long debated is the exact location of this emergence and subsequent dispersal of our earliest ancestors." Prof Hayes' conclusions have drawn skepticism from other researchers in the field, however. Lakeland haven The area in question is south of the Zambezi basin, in northern Botswana. The researchers think our ancestors settled near Africa's huge lake system, known as Lake Makgadikgadi, which is now an area of sprawling salt flats. "It's an extremely large area, it would have been very wet, it would have been very lush," said Prof Hayes. "And it would have actually provided a suitable habitat for modern humans and wildlife to have