2y ago

Human ancestors nearly went extinct 900,000 years ago: a new technique analysing modern genetic data suggests that pre-humans survived in a group of only 1,280 individuals.

www.nature.com

Human ancestors nearly went extinct 900,000 years ago

19 comments

I mean, the biblical version is just two.... and their three sons.
- Until they wandered around and miraculously found more people that were never explained how they survived.
I feel like we knew this years ago. Is this another way of confirming it?
- This is a third bottleneck, earlier than the 2 we already knew about.
  Specifically, this affects the entire human population.
  The other 2 bottlenecks were specifically the humans which moved out of Africa - with one being as humans crossed into the Middle East and a second as humans crossed the Bering Strait.
  This third one was earlier, and covers all humans, even the ones which never left Africa. These are separate from the more localized "founder events" that we see all over the world.
  
  Ooh thanks, I did not know this!
- No this is different, actually. The other event is the hypothesized genetic bottleneck triggered by the Toba supervolcano eruption only 74,000 years ago as opposed to 900,000 years ago for this newly proposed event.
  https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tobacatastrophetheory
  
  Fascinating!
We're all a combination of 1280 individuals !?
I feel so lucky that I find the topic of our evolution and our cousins and so on as exciting as I do. The reason I feel lucky is because it's a topic that is constantly turning out new discoveries and that makes life thrilling. Also, it feels like the rate of discovery has really exploded over the past decade or two. Remember the article about the "hobbits"? I just checked and that was 2004. Last December, Lee Berger revealed Homonaledi. Holy crap is this topic overflowing with cool news.
- What hobbit article?
  
  Here's the wiki article.
  TLDR; They were a human species that lived on an island and were very small.
  
  Stuff like this:
  https://www.discovermagazine.com/planet-earth/meet-homo-floresiensis-the-real-life-hobbits-of-indonesia
  https://www.nhm.ac.uk/discover/homo-floresiensis-hobbit.html
  And here's the wiki article:
  https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Homo_floresiensis
2^{10 + 2}8 = 1280
Some mathematical model
No one else is going to acknowledge that my dude is kind of dreamy?
- [redacted]
Look like average in street situation person

19 comments