Lush Okavango Delta

Lush Okavango Delta Pinpointed as Ancestral Homeland of All Living Humans

Genetic evidence traces our origins to a hunter-gatherer community that lived 200,000 years ago, but the study has generated controversy   

• By Richard Conniff on October 28, 2019

Juǀ’hoansi hunters ǀkun ǀkunta, Nǂamce Sao and ǀkun Nǂamce re-creating how our ancestors hunted when the Homeland was once a vast wetland. ǀkun ǀkunta, Nǂamce Sao and ǀkun Nǂamce today live within the dried Homeland. Credit: Chris Bennett

Anyone lucky enough to have visited the Okavango Delta in the southern African nation of Botswana will recall the comforting and oddly familiar sensation of looking out from the shelter of a stand of trees at the panorama of wildlife—from elephants and African wild dogs to lilac-breasted rollers—moving across the lush surrounding floodplains. That sense of familiarity may run deeper than we imagine, a new study suggests—back to a time when early modern humans also wandered there.

The study, appearing Monday in the journal Nature, uses genetic, archaeological, linguistic and climatic evidence to argue that the ancestral homeland of everyone alive today was in northern Botswana—not in East Africa, as previously thought. Based on mitochondrial DNA, passed down from mother to daughter, the paper’s co-authors argue that we are all descended from a small community of Khoisan hunter-gatherers who lived 200,000 years ago in vast wetlands encompassing Botswana’s Okavango Delta and the Makgadikgadi regions.