* Astronomy

Locations for the Garden of Eden have been offered many times before, but seldom in the inhospitable borderland of Angola and Namibia.
A new genetic survey of people in Africa, the largest of its kind, suggests that the region in the south-west of the continent seems to be the origin of modern humans. The authors have also identified some 14 ancestral populations.

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A group of scientists have unveiled what they say is the most comprehensive study ever of African genes.
Published following a decade of study, the researchers say their findings give new insight into the origins of humans.
The first humans probably evolved near the South Africa-Namibia border before migrating north, the study says.

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In his article "Pristine Vleesbaai in the firing line" (April 12), Bobby Jordan wrote that the bay is "thought to be the cradle of humankind". Not so! - Michael Wilson, Cape Town

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Paleoanthropologists working in Africa have discovered stone blades more than a half-million years old. That pushes the date of the earliest known blades back a remarkable 150,000 years and raises a question: What human ancestor made them?
Not long ago, researchers thought that blades were so hard to make that they had to be the handiwork of modern humans, who had evolved the mental wherewithal to systematically strike a cobble in the right way to produce blades and not just crude stone flakes. First, they were thought to be a hallmark of the late Stone Age, which began 40,000 years ago. Later, blades were thought to have emerged in the Middle Stone Age, which began about 200,000 years ago when modern humans arose in Africa and invented a new industry of more sophisticated stone tools. But this view has been challenged in recent years as researchers discovered blades that dated to 380,000 years in the Middle East and to almost 300,000 years ago in Europe, where Neanderthals may have made them.
Now it appears that more than 500,000 years ago, human ancestors living in the Baringo Basin of Kenya collected lava stone cobbles from a riverbed and hammered them in just the right way to produce stone blades. Paleoanthropologists Cara Roure Johnson and Sally McBrearty of the University of Connecticut, Storrs, recently discovered the blades at five sites in the region, including two that date to between 509,000 and 543,000 years ago.

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