Michael is joined by Professor Vanessa Hayes, Garvin Institute Lead Researcher & Senior Author of a landmark study that pinpoints the birthplace of modern humans in southern Africa… and suggests how past climate shifts drove their first migration.

The study provides a window into the first 100 thousand years of modern humans’ history and concludes that the earliest ancestors of anatomically modern humans (Homo sapiens sapiens) emerged in a southern African ‘homeland’ and thrived there for 70 thousand years.

Professor Hayes, and her co-author Dr Eva Chan, propose that changes in Africa’s climate triggered the first human explorations, which initiated the development of humans’ genetic, ethnic and cultural diversity.

The breakthrough findings were published yesterday in the prestigious journal ‘Nature’.

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