Scientists have released a report stating that all humans alive today originated from south of the Zambesi River, in modern Botswana.
According to the report, the area was once home to an enormous lake.
Researchers claim this region is the ancestral homeland of humans as life was evident there 200,000 years ago.
The researchers proposed that "ancestors of modern humans settled there for 70,000 years until the local climate changed."
They claim that the ancestors began to move on as fertile green corridors opened up, paving the way for future migrations out of Africa.
"It has been clear for some time that anatomically modern humans appeared in Africa roughly 200,000 years ago," said Prof Vanessa Hayes, a geneticist at the Garvan Institute of Medical Research in Australia.
"What has been long debated is the exact location of this emergence and subsequent dispersal of our earliest ancestors."
As expected, Prof Hayes' research reports have attracted huge criticisms from other schools of thought.
One of the foremost critics of the report is renowned scientists, Prof Chris Stringer of the Natural History Museum, London.
Prof Stringer objected the report claiming that 'reconstruction of the story of human origins cannot be based on mitochondrial DNA alone because the evolution of Homo sapiens was a complicated process.'
"You can't use modern mitochondrial distributions on their own to reconstruct a single location for modern human origins," he told BBC News.
"I think it's over-reaching the data because you're only looking at one tiny part of the genome so it cannot give you the whole story of our origins."
Thus, there could have been many homelands, rather than one, which has yet to be pinned down.
"It's a huge area, it would have been very wet, it would have been very lush," said Prof Hayes. "And it would have provided a suitable habitat for modern humans and wildlife to have lived."
What are your thoughts?
Header Image Credit: Stock News-Press