Human Origins in Southern African Palaeo-wetlands? Strong Claims from Weak Evidence

Andrea took part in a response to the very debated article recently published in Nature by Chan and colleagues claiming a Southern African origin of Homo sapiens based on present-day mitochondrial DNA data.

Carina M. Schlebusch, Liisa Loog, Huw S. Groucutt, Turi King, Adam Rutherford, Chiara Barbieri, Guido Barbujani, Lounès Chikhi, Mattias Jakobsson, Anders Eriksson, Andrea Manica, Sarah A. Tishkoff, Eleanor M.L. Scerri, Aylwyn Scally, Chris Brierley, Mark G. Thomas(2019) Human Origins in Southern African Palaeo-wetlands? Strong Claims from Weak Evidence Preprints 2019110193

Abstract
Chan and colleagues in their paper titled “Human origins in a southern African palaeo-wetland and first migrations” (https://www.nature.com/articles/s41586-019-1714-1) report 198 novel whole mitochondrial DNA (mtDNA) sequences and infer that ‘anatomically modern humans’ originated in the Makgadikgadi–Okavango palaeo-wetland of southern Africa around 200 thousand years ago. This claim relies on weakly informative data. In addition to flawed logic and questionable assumptions, the authors surprisingly disregard recent evidence and debate on human origins in Africa. As a result, the emphatic and high profile conclusions of the paper are unjustified.