We Dodged Extinction

ABCNews ^ | Lee Dye

[Sabertooth]

We Dodged Extinction
	‘Pruned’ Family Tree Leaves Little Genetic Variety Just one group of chimpanzees can have more genetic diversity than all 6 billion humans on the planet. (Corel)

Special to ABCNEWS.com
A worldwide research program has come up with astonishing evidence that humans have come so close to extinction in the past that it’s surprising we’re here at all.
    Pascal Gagneux, an evolutionary biologist at the University of California at San Diego, and other members of a research team studied genetic variability among humans and our closest living relatives, the great apes of Africa.
     Humanoids are believed to have split off from chimpanzees about 5 million to 6 million years ago. With the passage of all that time, humans should have grown at least as genetically diverse as our “cousins.” That turns out to be not true.
     “We actually found that one single group of 55 chimpanzees in west Africa has twice the genetic variability of all humans,” Gagneux says. “In other words, chimps who live in the same little group on the Ivory Coast are genetically more different from each other than you are from any human anywhere on the planet.”

The branch lengths illustrate the number of genetic differences, not only between species, but among species as well. The pruned bush for humans shows how little genetic diversity exists. (Marco Doelling/ABCNEWS.com)

The Family Bush
“The family tree shows that the human branch has been pruned,” Gagneux says. “Our ancestors lost much of their original variability.”
     “That makes perfectly good sense,” says Bernard Wood, the Henry R. Luce Professor of Human Origins at George Washington University and an expert on human evolution.
     “The amount of genetic variation that has accumulated in humans is just nowhere near compatible with the age” of the species, Wood says. “That means you’ve got to come up with a hypothesis for an event that wiped out the vast majority of that variation.”
     The most plausible explanation, he adds, is that at least once in our past, something caused the human population to drop drastically. When or how often that may have happened is anybody’s guess. Possible culprits include disease, environmental disaster and conflict.

Almost Extinct
“The evidence would suggest that we came within a cigarette paper’s thickness of becoming extinct,” Wood says.
     Gagneux, who has spent the last 10 years studying chimpanzees in Africa, says the implications are profound.
     “If you have a big bag full of marbles of different colors, and you lose most of them, then you will probably end up with a small bag that won’t have all the colors that you had in the big bag,” he says.
     Similarly, if the size of the human population was severely reduced some time in the past, or several times, the “colors” that make up our genetic variability will also be reduced.
     If that is indeed what happened, then we should be more like each other, genetically speaking, than the chimps and gorillas of Africa. And that’s just what the research shows.
     “We all have this view in our minds that we [humans] started precariously as sort of an ape-like creature” and our numbers grew continuously, adds Wood. “We’re so used to the population increasing inexorably over the past few hundred years that we think it has always been like that.”
     But if it had, Gagneux notes, our genetic variability should be at least as great as that of apes.

A Stormy Past
Gagneux is the lead author of a report that appeared in the April 27 issue of the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. The study, carried out with researchers in Germany, Switzerland and the United States, is the first to examine large numbers of all four ape species in Africa.
     “We can do that now because new technology allows us to non-invasively take some hair, or even some fruit that these apes chew, and then we get their DNA from a couple of cells that stick to a hair or a piece of fruit they chewed.”
     Then they compared the DNA variability of apes and chimps to that of 1,070 DNA sequences collected by other researchers from humans around the world. They also added the DNA from a bone of a Neanderthal in a German museum. The results, the researchers say, are very convincing.
     “We show that these taxa [or species] have very different amounts and patterns of genetic variation, with humans being the least variable,” they state.
     Yet humans have prevailed, even though low genetic variability leaves us more susceptible to disease.
     “Humans, with what little variation they have, seem to maximize their genetic diversity,” Gagneux says.
     “It’s ironic,” he notes, that after all these years the biggest threat to chimpanzees is human intrusion into their habitats. When he returned to Africa to study a group of chimps he had researched earlier, Gagneux found them gone.
     “They were dead,” he says, “and I mean the whole population had disappeared in five years.”
     Yet as our closest living relatives, chimps still have much to teach us about ourselves.

Lee Dye’s column appears Wednesdays on ABCNEWS.com. A former science writer for the Los Angeles Times, he now lives in Juneau, Alaska.

[monkey]

“The evidence would suggest that we came within a cigarette paper’s thickness of becoming extinct,” Wood says.

Damn tobacco companies.

[Doctor Doom]

Most likely candidate I've seen for the cause of the almost-extinction was the eruption of the Supervolcano Toba in Indonesia 70,000 years ago...

That would have between the years when the oceans drank Atlantis, and the rise of the Sons of Aryas - an age undreamed of...

[realpatriot71]

Even if there was a flood, there were eight humans and two chimps on that boat. What would explain the greater genetic diversity from the smaller gene pool evolving over the same time period?

[Rushian]

Of course the evolutionary biologists didn't say it,but it looks like their finding of the lack of genetic diversity in human beings is best explained by some catastrophic event. Darn, Moses must have thought of that and gave us the myth of Noah and the flood to explain it. You would have thought Darwin would have factored that in, but guess he didn't understand it as well as Moses.

[Gladwin]

7 of the 8 humans didn't have any children?

[Swordmaker]

Ah, but Noah took not only his genetic makeup but his wife's, his son's and THEIR wives' genetic makeup as well. The chimpanzees on board would have numbered only two...

Ergo, this explanation does not work because there would be MORE human variability than chimp... about four to one.

[Gladwin]

Or, humans are a recent species.

[Sabertooth]

Even if there was a flood, there were eight humans and two chimps on that boat. What would explain the greater genetic diversity from the smaller gene pool evolving over the same time period?

The humans were all from the same family, except perhaps, the wives (although incest prohibitions didn't come until later). If the chimps weren't, that would explain it.

[First_Salute]

Is there not another possibility, that the human "line" was sudden and somewhat unique?

The passing close by our atmosphere of a particularly radiation-active body, could have introduced the variant; as well as solar moments.

It is a mistake to think of evolution as only gradual, when the evidence has already presented over the last decades, that radiation, for example, can cause sudden and dramatic change.

[Rushian]

Because of the decreased life expectancy of the chimp, there have numerous more generations, and each generation offers the chance for diversity. They were only twice as diverse, so would have only needed twice the number of generations.

[Sci Fi Guy]

The amount of genetic variation that has accumulated in humans is just nowhere near compatible with the age” of the species, Wood says. “That means you’ve got to come up with a hypothesis for an event that wiped out the vast majority of that variation.”

I wonder how often this happens. The evidence contradicts our theories. So rather than reexamining the theory, we speculate new hypotheses to make the evidence fit our theories. I suspect it happens far more than anyone knows.

[realpatriot71]

Ergo, this explanation does not work because there would be MORE human variability than chimp... about four to one.

Great minds think alike?

(I said it first! Neeener, neeeener! :-p)

[Valin]

We will protect you sub-norms.

Thank you very much for your kind offer but we already have the lovely and gracious hillary to take care of us and protect us.

[Doctor Stochastic]

This agrees with the Toba event. Looks like that eruption wiped out most of the human race.

[Alamo-Girl]

Thanks for the heads up!

[realpatriot71]

So what you're saying is because the 8 humans were related, even though they numbered more, their gene pool was still less diverse in the first place. Interesting. Throw a bit of a monkey-wrench into my thoughts. I'll have to think some more about this one. Hmmmmmmm . . .

[Cicero]

Well, I have problems with the general theory of evolution, too. A good deal of it doesn't make much sense, scientifically. There is minor evolutionary development within species, certainly but after a century and a half of looking, they still haven't found any proof of evolution from one species to another.

In this case, they find an embarassing discrepancy with the way things should be among humans, according to their theory. So, they posit an "extinction" event to explain this embarrassing discrepancy, although there is no scientific evidence for it whatever. That's not science. It's what used to be called "saving the appearances." That is to say, desperately thinking up new theories to explain why your old theories don't fit the evidence.

As I understand it, DNA evidence suggests that all the human races probably go back to something that looks suspiciously like a single female ancestor--a woman whom some scientists jokingly refer to as "Eve."

[Doctor Doom]

they still haven't found any proof of evolution from one species to another.

Creationist Myth #244 "There's no proof of speciation."

[realpatriot71]

Frequent generations don't really help that much. For instance if you only originally had two possible outcomes for a particular trait in the first place. It does not matter how many come later, there will only be two options. There is always the chance for muation and genetic recombination. However, these changes normally end up with deletrious results. If the flood happened between 10,000 and 4000 years ago, there is no where near enough time for this much non-deletrious mutation and recombination to occur in order to see the differences that we do. Sorry.

[Sabertooth]

Keep in mind, I'm not offering a definitive argument one way, or the other. I kind of enjoy the areas where Genesis and science seem like they might overlap.