North of Botswana, Kalahari Desert

**Ludicus** · October 29, 2019, 05:14 PM

....It's the location of a proposed homeland for the maternal ancestors of living humans.
Published online: 28 October 2019 Full article PDF
Journal Nature
Human origins in a southern African palaeo-wetland and first migrations
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Vanessa Hays says that mtDNA because it doesn’t get shuffled in early fetal development like other types of DNA do. She says. "It acts like a time capsule for our ancestral mothers"; southern Africa is home to contemporary populations that represent the earliest branch of human genetic phylogeny. Taken together, we propose a southern African origin of anatomically modern humans with sustained homeland occupation before the first migrations of people that appear to have been driven by regional climate changes".

Criticism

....Sarah Tishkoff, a geneticist at the University of Pennsylvania, also raised doubts. “How can they know that there aren’t old lineages in other regions if they’re not included in the study?” she said.
“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.”
Rebecca Ackermann, an archaeologist at the University of Cape Town, said the study appeared to brush aside extensive evidence that suggests the roots of our species are pan-African and beyond. “Drawing sweeping conclusions about places of origin from analyses of this tiny part of the modern genome is deeply problematic and outdated,” she said.

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Hello expert members, your contribution is welcome... Sumskilz? share your point of view.

**alhoon** · October 29, 2019, 05:34 PM

I am so glad that we're all coming from sub-Saharan Africa. Please, please, someone tell the Eugenics people.

**Cyclops** · October 29, 2019, 06:49 PM

Not an expert, but I'm pretty sure I have Neanderthal ancestors who GTFO of Africa a bit before that...

**sumskilz** · October 30, 2019, 02:31 AM

I agree with both of the critiques quoted from the Guardian, and I can elaborate on more. Sarah Tishkoff notes “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… because humans migrate over long distances.”

It is known that the predominate ancestry of Khoisan people is from the most basal modern human population still in existence. Most basal meaning split from the rest closest to the root. L0 is the most basal surviving mtDNA lineage. If there is little or no selection pressure on mtDNA, then it is logical to assume the population that has the most diversity of a particular mtDNA lineage probably has the most ancestry from the group amongst whom the mtDNA lineage originated. The degree to which selection pressure has contributed to modern human mtDNA diversity is not really known. Nevertheless, this study’s association of L0 with Khoisan people seems logical. That the most basal surviving mtDNA lineage would be associated with the most basal human population is hardly shocking, but that doesn’t imply anything specific about where the population divergence happened.

Inferences about the geographical origin of particular uniparental lineages based on the geographic distribution of modern populations has been proven time and again to be completely wrong when analyzed against ancient DNA, and that is true for haplogroups that only emerged within the last 10,000 years, while these authors are looking back 200,000 years. Mitochondrial DNA lineages also go extinct. It may very well be that the other branch in the divergence likewise had L0, but it just happened to go extinct early in that branch or is too rare elsewhere to have been noticed thus far (due to selection or chance). L0 in Khoisan, or the lack thereof in other populations, may be nothing more than the product of an ancient founder effect.

I don’t believe modern humans originated in West Africa or Southern Africa because until relatively recently those regions appear to have been occupied by archaic humans:

Abstract: While introgression from Neanderthals and Denisovans has been well-documented in modern humans outside Africa, the contribution of archaic hominins to the genetic variation of present-day Africans remains poorly understood. Using 405 whole-genome sequences from four sub-Saharan African populations, we provide complementary lines of evidence for archaic introgression into these populations. Our analyses of site frequency spectra indicate that these populations derive 2-19% of their genetic ancestry from an archaic population that diverged prior to the split of Neanderthals and modern humans. Using a method that can identify segments of archaic ancestry without the need for reference archaic genomes, we built genome-wide maps of archaic ancestry in the Yoruba and the Mende populations that recover about 482 and 502 megabases of archaic sequence, respectively. Analyses of these maps reveal segments of archaic ancestry at high frequency in these populations that represent potential targets of adaptive introgression. Our results reveal the substantial contribution of archaic ancestry in shaping the gene pool of present-day African populations.