Scientists fault new research tracing modern humans to Botswana

A new research claiming that modern humans originated in northern Botswana some 200,000 years ago has been criticised by experts who said the researchers relied on unproven and outdated techniques while also excluding competing lines of evidence.

Alarmingly, the paper is also being criticised for its colonial undertones.

The elusive search for the proverbial Garden of Eden has led an international team of scientists to northern Botswana, specifically an area just south of the Zambezi River.

It was in this exact part of Africa, according to the team’s research, where the anatomically modern humans, Homo sapiens, first appeared hundreds of thousands of years ago, a conclusion derived from genetic, geological, linguistic, and climate data.

The research, co-authored by geneticist Vanessa Hayes from the Garvan Institute of Medical Research and the University of Sydney, is unique in that it pinpoints the exact place and time of our species’ emergence.

However, scientists have continued to pick holes in the new paper with many of them in agreement that the researchers relied on unproven and outdated techniques while also excluding competing lines of evidence.

“It’s really staggering how they try to speak with authority about a subject area they clearly know nothing about.”

“I think it’s a terrible piece of scholarship that has taken us back in time to around 2004 and completely undermined science in the public eye,” archaeologist Eleanor Scerri of the Max Planck Institute for the Science of Human History said in an email to Gizmodo.

“The work is incredibly arrogant in how it ignores archaeology and physical anthropology. It’s really staggering how they try to speak with authority about a subject area they clearly know nothing about.”

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Paleoanthropologist Jean-Jacques Hublin from the Department of Human Evolution at the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology said the new paper provides a “thorough and valuable analysis of the ancient lineages of mitochondrial DNA [the bits of genetic material we inherit from our maternal line] in the southern part of the African continent.”

But Hublin’s praise stopped there.

“The authors ’conclusions regarding the identification of a ‘Garden of Eden’ where the ancestors of all living humans would have appeared is quite questionable,” he said in an email to Gizmodo.

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