Brandon Spektor in Live Science:
Two hundred thousand years ago, the earliest shared ancestors of every living human on Earth rested their feet at a verdant oasis in the middle of Africa’s Kalahari Desert. Here, in a patchwork of now-extinct lakes, forests and grasslands known as the Makgadikgadi paleowetland, our greatest grandmothers and -grandfathers hunted, gathered and raised families for tens of thousands of years. Eventually, as Earth’s climate changed, shifts in rainfall opened up fertile new paths through the desert. For the first time, our distant relatives had the chance to explore the unknown, putting behind them what a team of researchers now calls “the ancestral homeland of all humans alive today.”
…”We’ve known for a long time that humans originated in Africa and roughly 200,000 years ago,” study author Vanessa Hayes, a geneticist at the Garvan Institute of Medical Research and University of Sydney, both in Australia, said in a news conference. “But what we hadn’t known until this study was where, exactly this homeland was.”
More here. (Note: At least one post throughout the month of February will be devoted to Black History Month. The theme for 2022 is Black Health and Wellness)