A new study claims modern humans originated in Botswana. Many scientists aren't buying it.

A new study pegging a region in Botswana as the origin site for modern humans is getting some buzz, but not always for the right reasons.

Vanessa Hayes, a geneticist at the Garvan Institute of Medical Research in Australia, and her team analyzed the DNA of 1,217 people from southern Africa, reaching the conclusion that humans originated in the Makgadikgadi wetlands in northern Botswana around 200,000 years ago and remained there for around 70,000 years before branching out across Africa and eventually to other continents.

But a lot of scientists aren't buying the research, and some, The Atlantic reports, were "outright mad." Many skeptics think the sample size was too small and only accounts for a sliver of the human genome. "The conclusions are far-fetched and very much overstated," said Carina Schlebusch, a geneticist at Uppsala University who specializes in southern Africa. "It tells us very little about human origins as a whole."

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Chris Stringer of the Natural History Museum in London concurred, telling BBC "you can't use modern mitochondrial distributions on their own to reconstruct a single location for modern human origins." In other words, it's a lot more complicated than the study shows. It doesn't seem likely to change the minds of scientists who have grown more convinced humanity didn't actually originate in one place and instead support the idea of "multiregionalism," which argues modern humans have several different origin sites across the African continent. Read more at The Atlantic and BBC.