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Africa is the homeland of humanity – at least, that’s what most experts think

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A study published in the journal Nature in 2019 claimed the ancestral homeland of all humans alive today can be found south of the Zambezi River in present-day Botswana , southern Africa .

The researchers reached this conclusion by looking at the earliest-known branch of human maternal DNA, called the L0 mitochondrial DNA lineage, in 1,217 people from southern Africa . By combining the genetic evidence with linguistic, cultural, geological, and archaeological data, they pinpointed the location to the Makgadikgadi-Okavango paleo-wetland.