Lucy Devine
Scientists believe they've discovered the ancestral home of humans, after years of trying to pinpoint where human life originated.
Despite all the incredible progress science has made in understanding evolution and how we came to be on the planet Earth, there's still so much we don't know about human life.
However, scientists in Australia have sparked debate after using DNA to provide clues about where humans originally came from.
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Professor Vanessa Hayes, a geneticist at the Garvan Institute of Medical Research in Sydney, and her team analysed 1,217 samples of mitochondrial DNA, which is passed down from mother to child.
The DNA came from people living in southern Africa, with Hayes noting that 'we have known for a long time that modern humans originated in Africa and roughly 200,000 years ago'.
Hayes explained that 'what we hadn’t known until this study was where exactly' humans came from.
Using the DNA, Hayes and her team traced the oldest maternal line of humans and found it pointed back to an 'ancestral home' that spreads from Namibia, across Botswana and into Zimbabwe.
Incredibly, the team managed to pinpoint this even further, using geological, archaeological and fossil evidence to find a body of water that would have been Africa's largest ever lake.
Hayes explained: “It would have been very lush and it would have provided a suitable habitat for modern humans and wildlife to have lived."
It's believed that the body of water, which is located just south of the Zambezi river, could have sustained human life for 70,000 years.
Despite this, some doubt had been shed on the findings, which were published in the journal Nature.
According to The Guardian, Chris Stringer, who studies human origins at the Natural History Museum in London, commented: “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.
“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, once other data are considered.”
Meanwhile, Sarah Tishkoff, a geneticist at the University of Pennsylvania, added: “It is not possible to make inferences about the geographical origin of modern humans in Africa based solely on patterns of variation in modern populations. This is because humans migrate over long distances.
"They migrated out of Africa and across the globe within the past 80,000 years and they have migrated across Africa in the recent and ancient past.”