Ancestral home of all human beings discovered by scientists

[G_j]

https://www.independent.co.uk/environment/homo-sapiens-origin-humans-botswana-zambezi-river-a9174396.html?fbclid=IwAR3-wtsSeY5CLiazq1gL5i8UK7vtn_Gv1FKXAy05fjOdtgPZ7EQnrfF5LE

Vast wetland south of Zambezi river was cradle of all mankind and sustained our ancestors for 70,000 years

Scientists have pinpointed a fertile river valley in northern Botswana as the ancestral home of all human beings.

The earliest anatomically modern humans (Homo sapiens) arose 200,000 years ago in a vast wetland south of the Zambezi river which was the cradle of all mankind, a new study has revealed.

This lush region – which also covered parts of Namibia and Zimbabwe – was home to an enormous lake which sustained our ancestors for 70,000 years, according to the paper published in the journal Nature.

Between 110,000 and 130,000 years ago, the climate started to change and fertile corridors opened up out of this valley. For the first time, the population began to disperse – paving the way for modern humans to migrate out of Africa, and ultimately, across the world.

..more..

[Lochloosa]

1. Not possible. The earth is only 6000 years old...

[3catwoman3]

7. And flat, too.

[usaf-vet]

10. That has alway confused me the disparity of a few years between 200,000 and 6000. Rounding error?

[jberryhill]

2. Are there enough chairs for Thanksgiving?

And do we each have to bring a dish?

[erronis]

17. No. I imagine some of us will be the dish....

[Dyedinthewoolliberal]

3. Well the white supremicists aren't going to like this bit of news

[flibbitygiblets]

5. Yup: Calling Homer Stokes from "Oh Brother": Dees Boys Ain't White! They ain't even old timey!

&feature=youtu.be

[at140]

4. "Between 110,000 and 130,000 years ago, the climate started to change"

Not possible, man was not driving automobiles, using fossil fuel power plants, did not even have homes to heat.
Those ancient primitive men did not even know how to start a fire to burn some twigs.

[paleotn]

12. Even erectus used fire

It’s easy unless you’re Homo suburbus or Tom Hanks.

[at140]

31. LOL that was funny!

But how many twigs would homo-erectus could burn using flint stones?
My Camaro with V-8 spewed more hot gases than a thousand erectus creatures could do in a month.

[lastlib]

36. (Tom Hanks had to have a Boy Scout teach him to make fire...

I met that Boy Scout ten years ago. He was phenomenal at fire by friction.)

[Eyeball_Kid]

22. uh-oh...

Here's a guy who apparently doesn't know the difference between slow ecospheric climate change and human-accelerated climate change. Did he miss Mr. Roger's Neighborhood when he was a tike?

[stopdiggin]

38. uh-oh is right

got a feeling maybe some of this science (and opinion) is coming from other sources. Just guessing.

[at140]

69. It would save lives if earth became warmer due to human

activity. Because it could lessen the intensity of next ice age cycle.
Extreme cold weather wave kills more people than a heat wave during summer.

[at140]

68. Definitely missed Mr Rogers

There was no TV in India during my childhood.

[muriel_volestrangler]

41. The most recent glacial period started about 115,000 years ago

They are driven by variations in the Earth's orbit and spin.

[Blue_true]

47. The earth has induced some climate change and landmass change on it's own.

The landmass on earth at one point was basically one or two gigantic pieces of land, they ultimately broke up into modern continents over billions of years. The earth started out as a fireball and cooled to what it is today. The earth is still cooling and it's magnetosphere is declining very slowly.

On it's own, the earth would change. We are just greatly accelerating some of the most negative change with our activities.

[at140]

67. I hope our human activity is causing the earth to

become a little bit warmer, which would lessen the intensity of next ice age.
Might even delay it a few millenniums.

Because more people perish during extreme cold weather than during heat waves.

[Blue_true]

70. That's one way of looking at it.

One of my concerns with climate change is that more and more of the earth's moisture will get swept away by solar winds if we keep sending moisture higher into the atmosphere in large quantities.

The prevailing scientific logic is that severe issues from climate change are far more likely to happen than death from another ice-age. The Sun, by the way is in a solar minima that it is going to be in for a while, so, in theory, an ice-age should be happening now.

The earth has undergone changes over it's 4+ billion years of existence. If we didn't have a certain amount of greenhouse gases in the atmosphere to deflect solar rays back to earth, the earth would have a frigid surface. It is possible that ice ages happened during periods when the earth's atmosphere was relatively depleted of greenhouse gases. There was an event on earth billions of years ago when virtually all of the oxygen on earth was released in the atmosphere as a class of prehistoric organisms died (oxygen release was part of their death cycle). So, the earth is capable itself of bringing about a very massive, life changing event on it's own. Now, the last thought get's me to Venus. Scientists now believe that Venus once had an earth-like appearance, with greenery and surface rivers, lakes and oceans, then a massive event took place to create the hellhole that Venus is now.

It won't matter in another 4 billion years anyway, the expanding Sun will destroy the earth. But my guess is that human beings would have finished their era long before that. My wonder is whether we will surpass the reign of the dinasaurs and before them, the giant lizards, those combined eras were around 400 million years, we have been here around 12-13 million years and seem to be doing our damnest to kill ourselves off.

[mcar]

6. Awesome!

[pintobean]

8. In-A-Gadda-Da-Vida baby

[MineralMan]

9. African Genesis.

And there it is.

[Blue_true]

48. That has pretty much been known for a long time. nt

[MineralMan]

50. Oh, OK...

[Blue_true]

54. I wasn't trying to be a smartass MM, it is just my recollection. nt

[not_the_one]

11. So, we are ALL NEGROID!

Lighter skins are nothing more than mutations, or .. FREAKS!?????

That should go over really well...

(Which explains my uncanny ability to have some semblance of rhythm, from an obviously VERY recessive gene...)

[MineralMan]

13. No. We are all Homos.

Homo Sapiens. There is no difference between any of us, genetically. We can interbreed with each other with no problem. We can get along with each other, too, if we choose to. I suggest we do just that.

[LisaM]

15. And we are overwhelmingly immigrants.....

I guess unless you come from a family that has stayed in Botswana all this time.

[csziggy]

19. THe most sgnificant genetic difference is Neanderthal DNA

And possibly Denisovan.

Nearly every human being outside of Africa has some Neanderthal DNA, a lot of people in Melanesia and Eastern Asia have Denisovan DNA.

People from Africa who have not mixed blood with people from outside the continent have neither DNA.

So the "purest race" are those of full African descent while the "white races" are mutts with mixtures of various DNA including non-Homo sapiens. I love the irony of that.

[MineralMan]

21. And yet, we are all the same species, and can reproduce together,

which is one of the characteristics of being the same species.

Our skin pigmentation has nothing to do with being part of the same species. In my yard, for example, I have gray squirrels, but there are also some white and black squirrels. All can interbreed with each other. They're all the same species, but some have different pigmentation. The squirrels don't seem to notice or care about pigmentation. They all recognize each other as squirrels. On the other hand, we also have red squirrels in our yard, which are a different species that cannot breed with gray squirrels. Occasionally, a fox squirrel or flying squirrel shows up at our feeders, too. Again, though, they are different species.

All human beings on the planet are one species. We should stop acting as if that weren't true.

[Eyeball_Kid]

29. I'm not sure we can pinpoint the time in history when "pure" genetic heritage existed.

Africans who never left Africa may not have "Denisovan" or "Neanderthal" DNA, but their genetic makeup was/is the result of millions of years of hybridization from other hominid species.

In other words, hybridization is the rule, with no exception, for all of homo sapiens sapiens.

Racists, and clearly white supremacists, have no inkling that there is no such thing as an intraspecies hierarchy of "superiority." All of the notions of classifications among skin color, gender, and other physical characteristics are cultural creations that have NO bearing on physical anthropology and/or DNA combinations.

[Spider Jerusalem]

30. Not really; Africans are admixed with other archaic hominin species

the evidence is in the DNA, but we don't have the ancient DNA to identifty those archaic species (unlike the Neanderthal and Denisovan finds in caves in Europe and Siberia, where the climate was much more conducive to preservation of ancient DNA). See here for instance: https://www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1101/285734v2

[nitpicker]

45. +1

[Blue_true]

49. If human life started in one region of Africa,

how did Neanderthals and Denisovans come about?

My guess is that some type of mutation happened and the mutants were driven out, no one bred with them. An Albino would have been a strange being in early Africa, superstition would have resulted in such people either being murdered, or if their tribe was kind, being sent out on their own. The fact that the purest White can interbred with the purest African without any issue, to me, indicates that what happened to bring about the variety of skin tones and hair textures were genetic mutations that took place over time.

[csziggy]

62. There multiple emigrations out of Africa

From as early as Homo erectus on - or possibly earlier (see https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Homo_floresiensis#Classification). As each wave spread, they continued to evolve, creating various strains of hominids, some of which could often still interbreed.

Neanderthals and Denisovans would have been the result of earlier migrations that what we think of as modern humans, possibly the descendants of Homo heidelbergensis (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Homo_heidelbergensis) whose remains have been found in Europe dated over 400,000 years ago.

Studies of skin coloration in humans have shown that it was a gradual change as humans moved farther north and received less UV-B (which stimulates the production of Vitamin D). See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Human_skin_color#Evolution_of_skin_color

I'm using Wikipedia as a source rather than locating the often hard to access scholarly papers. If you want to learn more, follow the links from the Wikipedia articles.

Humans are mutts - as some of the replies to my comment indicate, we have never really had "pure" strains of our species.

[Blue_true]

65. Excellent info. You always come through with a fairly complete answer. nt

[DBoon]

52. "We are all devo!"

nt

[B Stieg]

14. tRump tweet this as "fake news" yet?

As is his wont...

[SCantiGOP]

26. Pence would say it might be accurate

Except it was 6,000 years ago. That gave the white Africans like Moses time to get up to Egypt in time for the whole Red Sea parting incident.

[rickyhall]

37. I heard somewhere dump may be part Orangutan

similar coloring

[spinbaby]

64. Don't insult orangutans

They are much better than that.

[Crunchy Frog]

71. That was Bill Maher's response to Trump's birther nonsense. Dump actually tried to sue him.

[LittleGirl]

16. I love Science

My racist sister’s head would explode if she knew this. But I did my DNA and I have blood from the African horn and so does she. Evil laugh.

[sakabatou]

18. XD

[jpak]

20. I thought the earliest modern humans were from North Africa 300,000 to 3500,000 years ago

https://www.nationalgeographic.com/news/2017/06/morocco-early-human-fossils-anthropology-science/

I'll have to read the Nature paper....

[LuvNewcastle]

35. It's changed so much I can't even keep up.

I would take bets that this will be disputed in another study in the near future.

[zaj]

23. Odd that we aren't fighting holy wars over this land.

[certainot]

24. very cool. this would have been about when humans began to become 90% right handed

because of sex on the wrong brain.

long before this we evolved divided brains. there is also evidence that human ancestors started off 50-50 right and left handed and eventually about 100,000 years ago became 90% right handed. there are various theories for this and the sowb theory suggests it was related to masturbation. the right handed masturbators were diverting sexual urges through parts of the brain used for quantifying, which increased greed and favored competition over cooperation, and parts of the brain often associated with language and logic, and that produced a need for finality, premature conclusion, closure, certainty. in an infinitely complicated universe full of uncertainty that increased fear. in times of scarcity and conflict those sex on the wrong brain characteristics provided a survival edge to right handers. even a small 'advantage' could increase over generations as they selected for particular brain structure that accentuated preferred symptoms of sowb. it got really bad the last few thousand years when we began to delay the age of reproduction. now 90% of humans, especially males, generally may have an increased susceptibility to authoritarian tendencies, with some human genetic lines moreso.

in hard times and in the absence of democracy, fear, suspicion, ignorance, authoritarianism, competition, and lack of empathy would win over curiosity, imagination, cooperation, etc.

columbus meets the natives, for example

[Crunchy Frog]

73. Actually, right hand preference goes back much further, and included Neanderthals and possibly much

farther than that.

http://blogs.discovermagazine.com/deadthings/2016/10/20/handedness-has-human-evolution-always-been-right/#.Xbj9UyxYbIU

[certainot]

74. well, the apes and chimps are generally 50-50 and masturbate so maybe it started after that

there has to be a bigger sample - that may not be available

whenever it was, at some point 50-50 became 90 -10

[PatrickforO]

25. So...a germ of truth in the old 'garden of Eden' myth.

This is very interesting.

[Hermit-The-Prog]

27. did they find the apple tree and the serpent's fossil?

Boy, the MAGAts sure missed a golden opportunity to build a wall; they could've stopped ALL those immigrant invasions!

[get the red out]

28. Thanks!

I am hooked on reading about anthropology.

[cbdo2007]

32. It's interesting that the population grew so slowly during that time.

Obviously life spans were very short, but with how quickly the population can multiply it's interesting that they really didn't expand for 70,000 years.

[NutmegYankee]

34. Lifespan hasn't changed much.

The AVERAGE has changed because of drastically reduced childhood mortality, but the lifespan of an adult even then was within 10 years of today.

[llmart]

55. Thank you for pointing that out.

I'm really getting tired of the constant chant of how "people are living so much longer with each passing generation". They are doing us all a great disservice convincing people that we're all going to live to be at least 90.

[roamer65]

56. Avg life expectancy in the US in 1900 was 46 years old.

It is now 78.

Almost double. The reason is improved medicine and of those the biggest was the development of antibiotics.

In 1900, I would have been dead at 48. Modern medicine has given me extra lifespan.

Here’s a good question for right wingers.

If single-payor Medicare is so bad in Canada, why is their avg life expectancy 4 years longer than ours? The avg life expectancy in Canada is 82. It is because people in Canada go to the doctor sooner. Earlier diagnoses equal better and cheaper outcomes.

[NutmegYankee]

57. Average. You missed the point.

People still lived to old age even in ancient times. An adult who survived childhood typically would make it to at least their 60s. The very high childhood mortality, and some losses in adulthood bring that down as an average. But it is a complete myth that people only lived to their 40s. I mean, just look at census records or even the civil war pensions.

[roamer65]

60. Much smaller numbers made it past the average age, but very few assume all were dead by 46.

Back then if you made it to your 70’s, you were considered very elderly and you had very few comrades.

When antibiotics truly start to fail, we will start to life expectancy drop across the board. That will be a good thing for the planet.

[miyazaki]

66. Ya they lived to old age. Noah was like 950 when he kicked off.

[Kaleva]

59. If you made it into adulthood back in 1900, odds were pretty good you'd live well past 48

"In 1900, at 20 you could expect to live 43 more years (63). "

https://www.reddit.com/r/Futurology/comments/2ylsbs/life_expectancy_after_20_yr_of_age_has_only/

[Spider Jerusalem]

72. Nope

infant mortality and death in childbirth were both much higher. Average lifespan of my 16 great-great-grandparents (born between 1845 and 1874) was 65 (the longest-lived died at 92, and five of them made it past 80).

[roamer65]

61. The planet is the victim of our success.

With our increased longevity, the planet has suffered as a result of the increased resource demands.

But when antibiotics start to truly fail, the system will right itself again.

[muriel_volestrangler]

63. The theory is that this region was good to live in then, but not the surrounding ones

After 70,000 years, climate change opened up new areas they as hunter-gatherers could thrive in.

[Hortensis]

33. Interesting and exciting, but CONTROVERSIAL theory.

It's not yet sufficiently proven to be widely accepted. But this is, at least:

The new study, importantly, focuses on analyzing today’s African populations, a gaping oversight in many past genetic studies. “Everyone recognizes we’ve been studying Europeans for way too long,” says Joshua Akey, a geneticist at Princeton University. “As studies go out and sample more human genomic diversity, we’ll eventually have a more deep and clear understanding of human history.”

Fascinating what we're learning these days. But itm, fine if all this instead causes some a nasty moment before reactionary rejection kicks in. Science says they'll all die off.

[MuseRider]

39. We are all from

a shit hole country!

<- just in case

[G_j]

43. had the same sad thought

ugh..

[RudyColludie]

40. I thought it was Missouri

[lindysalsagal]

42. Florida. You've obviously never been.

Million degrees, and you can't get dinner after 8 pm.

[Blue_true]

53. Well, there is Golden Corral after 8pm. nt

[EmeraldCoaster]

44. Great read on the subject

Sapiens: A Brief History of Humankind by Yuval Noah Harari

[leftstreet]

58. ...

Thanks for that referral

Just looked it up at goodreads and amazon - people really like it and claim it's reader-friendly

[Blue_true]

46. Do we have enough fainting pads down for white supremacists?

On second thought, maybe we should just drive big-assed nails up through the floor as "bedding" for them.

[tblue37]

51. K&R & thanks. nt