Australian scientists discover the ancestral home of modern humans

Modern humans emerged 200,000 years ago in a region of northern Botswana, scientists claimed on Monday, in what appeared to be the most precise location of mankind's "ancestral homeland" yet discovered.

Vanessa Hayes and the Ju/’hoansi family. Source: Chris Bennett/Evolving Picture

A group of scientists, led by Australian researchers, have pinpointed the location where humans first walked the earth. 

The birthplace of the human race was the Makgadikgadi-Okavango palaeo-wetland in Botswana, Namibia and Zimbabwe, researchers have discovered, approximately 200,000 years after the first human is believed to have existed.

At that time, the now barren area - dominated by desert and salt plains - was a wetland roughly the size of New Zealand, Sydney-based lead researcher Vanessa Hayes said.

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