DNA research suggests humanity's birthplace: region in north Botswana

It looks like we just learned another fact about the human race -- where we took our first footsteps, with new research suggesting humanity's earliest footsteps took place in a pre-historic wetland called Makgadikgadi-Okavango, south of the Great Zambezi River.

The ancestors of Homo sapiens started over 200,000 years ago according to the researchers, where Botswana, and even parts of Namibia and Zimbabwe are just south of the where modern day humanity's first footsteps took place. Climate change is being blamed as to why the ancestors of modern day humans moved some 70,000 years ago -- forcing them to migrate out of Africa and then spread throughout the planet.

Previous fossil evidence led researchers to believe that modern humans started out in eastern Africa, but new DNA evidence is showing that the Botswana/Africa region is where it all started. Vanessa Hayes, lead study author at the Garvan Institute of Medical Research and the University of Sydney explains: "It has been clear for some time that anatomically modern humans appeared in Africa roughly 200,000 years ago. What has been long debated is the exact location of this emergence and subsequent dispersal of our earliest ancestors. We've been able to pinpoint what we believe is our human homeland".