Another twofer!
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 ...
The technique “put the spotlight on the period 800,000 to one million years ago - for which there is much unknown - in a way that hasn’t been done before,” says Stanley Ambrose, an anthropologist at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign.This period was part of the Early-Middle Pleistocene transition - a time of drastic climate change, when glacial cycles became longer and more intense. In Africa, this led to long periods of drought. Li says that the changing climate might have wiped out human ancestors and forced new human species to emerge. Eventually, these might have evolved into the last common ancestor of modern humans and our extinct relatives, the Denisovans and Neanderthals.
We do however know that around 1,300,000 BC - Yellowstone, Huckleberry Ridge, Wyoming, U.S. (Super Volcano) Erupted, followed by 1,100,000 BC - Valles Caldera, Jemez Mountains, U.S. (Super Volcano) Eruption.
So the 2 super volcanic eruptions could have made drastic environmental changes, which could account for this latest theory of population decline.
Interestingly, this same volcanic scenario would be repeated around 74,000 BC and another drastic population decline.
Clues from modern DNA To make their discovery, the researchers needed to invent new tools.
Maybe these people have the same problem.
TM
“how our era might be viewed by those 900k in the future.”
We can guess at the answer.
Their version of the Smithsonian will hide any artifacts in the basement....
Because those artifacts will almost certainly contradict the cultural narratives of the day.
;-)
Cold kills, not my Ram 1500 truck.
They must have missed that within the last 5,000 years we were down to only 8 people.
1280 breeders over 117000 years... that’s some serious inbreeding.
Too many campfires.
COVID 900000 BC?
Yet they can’t tell me if will rain or not tomorrow reliably.
Yeah. ‘New tools’ isn’t all these ‘researchers’ invented.
“the science behind these studies appears sound, entirely dependent upon the power of the processors performing the number crunching”
Seems to me the major basis of conclusions about a long time ago would be the raw data itself, not the crunching of it.
1280? 98.7%? I am aware of ancient population bottlenecks, but I am skeptical of spurious precision.
About 98.7% of human ancestors were lost
Maybe they saw where it was heading and decided it was better to stop now.
The way things are going now they may have been right.
Civility is on the decline at a rapid rate.
With 1200 survivors it did not clean the pool. Just added to more inbreeding in the populaiton.
The rest of the Homo Antecessor keyword, sorted:
>Architects of our own demise.
Yeah, we’re mimicking the population chaos that happens when mice overpopulate. First social disruption, then violence, then the population reduces until it becomes extinct.
I’m hoping we can plant a base on the moon or something close, because having a mission is crucial to human happiness. Space is endless, so it becomes an eternal mission.
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