Posted on 09/01/2023 5:47:16 AM PDT by logi_cal869
Human ancestors in Africa were pushed to the brink of extinction around 900,000 years ago, a study shows. The work1, published in Science, suggests a drastic reduction in the population of our ancestors well before our species, Homo sapiens, emerged. The population of breeding individuals was reduced to just 1,280 and didn’t expand again for another 117,000 years.
“About 98.7% of human ancestors were lost,” says Haipeng Li, a population geneticist at the University of Chinese Academy of Sciences in Beijing, who co-led the study. He says that the fossil record in Africa and Eurasia between 950,000 and 650,000 years ago is patchy and that “the discovery of this bottleneck may explain the chronological gap”.
Nick Ashton, an archaeologist at the British Museum in London, who wrote a related perspective2, says he was intrigued by the tiny size of the population. “This would imply that it occupied a very localized area with good social cohesion for it to survive,” he says. “Of greater surprise is the estimated length of time that this small group survived. If this is correct, then one imagines that it would require a stable environment with sufficient resources and few stresses to the system.”
Clues from modern DNA To make their discovery, the researchers needed to invent new tools. Advances in genome sequencing have improved scientists’ understanding of population sizes for the period after modern humans emerged, but the researchers developed a methodology that enabled them to fill in details about earlier human ancestors. Serena Tucci, an anthropologist at Yale University in New Haven, Connecticut, says that such work was sorely needed. “We still know very little about the population dynamics of early human ancestors for several reasons, including methodological limitations and difficulties in obtaining ancient DNA data from old Homo specimens,” she says.
(Excerpt) Read more at nature.com ...
But it's a shame that the event 900k years ago didn't clear all of the progressivism from the gene pool.
Our own 'bottleneck' is sure to come.
We call it ‘the great flood’
Maybe it was climate change....too much fossil fuel being used.
if CNN wasn’t there to report on it did it really happen? let’s ask Andrea. she looks old enough to have been there.
Fuels, hell! We almost ran out of fossils!
“ The population of breeding individuals was reduced to just 1,280 and didn’t expand again for another 117,000 years.”
That is ridiculous. There is no way that information is known.
Second, it was a flood.
Third, there will be another judgement - by FIRE!
They refused to stop and ask for directions.
That’s when the smart ones left Africa........................
I bet it was those evil SUVs.
You know, I was thinking, there was still monkeys left, I mean, you know, to make more humans, right..??
The article is utter Bullshit!
This is complete, absolute, unadulterated bull shit. There is just no way anyone on the face of this Earth could possibly state with any accuracy that there were just 1,280 breeding individuals 900,000 years ago.
It’s sad, just sad how science has become fictionalized erratic propaganda. Much of it for political purposes. Much of this has happened since the leftists of the world took over the western culture.
In the past hundred years or so there have been great strides made in the advancement of aviation, medicine, transportation, electronics, just to name a few. If science had always been a joke such as this article, we’d still be traveling by horse, there’d be no airplanes, radios and we’d be using witch doctors for medicine.
Sorry for the rant, but this level of BS ticks me off.
“That is ridiculous. There is no way that information is known.”
Scientists these days are “smaatttt”. They know the weather every day in every location on the planet for the last million years.
;-)
next they are going to say that they were socialists, and that socialism saved the human race
Supposedly a group of 25 chimpanzees will have more variation in their DNA than the entire human race has, because of that bottleneck.
Because each of us is the product of a unique combination of matings between myriads of ancestors over thousands of generations, if that massive die-off had not occurred, none of us would be here now, because other pairings of men and women (from the other 98.7%) would have produced different children who would have different descendants alive now.
900,000 years ago there were what, 4 ?
Well, they were illiterate, so they couldn't read the road signs.
The critique in this thread is interesting, and expected. I agree with your comment, however.
I've been following genomics for a number of years and the science behind these studies appears sound, entirely dependent upon the power of the processors performing the number crunching. However, as with all aspects of such simulations, GIGO applies, and I cannot deny a GIGO aspect to this study. As well, there are glaring gaps in data which may never be filled.
The 'great flood' was extinction #2, IMHO.
We are now at the precipice of #3. The part of my comment that I chose not to assign to the OP was speculation about how our era might be viewed by those 900k in the future.
Architects of our own demise.
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