Human Ancestors Nearly Went Extinct 900,000 Years Ago
Nearly a million years ago, some devastating event nearly wiped out humanity’s ancestors.
Genomic data from 3,154 modern humans suggests the population was reduced from approximately 100,000 to just 1,280 breeding individuals around 900,000 years ago. That’s a jaw-dropping population decline of 98.7 percent that lasted 117,000 years and could have brought humanity to extinction.
The fact we’re here today, and so numerous, is evidence that it wasn’t. But the results, according to a team led by geneticists Haipeng Li of the Chinese Academy of Sciences and Yi-Hsuan Pan of East China Normal University in China, would explain a curious gap in the human fossil record in the Pleistocene. […]
For this latest analysis, the research team developed a new method called the fast infinitesimal time coalescent process (FitCoal) to circumvent the accumulation of numerical errors usually associated with trying to unravel these past events.
They used FitCoal to analyze the genomic data of 3,154 people from around the world, from 10 African and 40 non-African populations, looking at how gene lineages have diverged over time. Their results showed a significant population bottleneck from around 930,000 to 813,000 years ago, which saw a current genetic diversity loss of up to 65.85 percent.
As the article notes, we’ll never know what actually caused this population bottleneck… which means someone out there has to build a time machine so we can go back in time to find out. And, in doing so, hopefully encourage the process so that H. sapiens sapiens never happens…
