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 ...
[snip] An interdisciplinary team of archaeologists, anthropologists and earth scientists have found evidence that a severe cooling event in the North Atlantic region approximately 1.1 million years ago wiped out all the archaic humans that populated Europe at that time.
As has just been reported in the journal Science, this massive and sudden freeze in the Early Pleistocene epoch rendered huge sections of Europe virtually uninhabitable for a period of approximately 4,000 years, and it would be another 200,000 years before archaic human hunter-gatherers were once again roaming across the continent...
Previous fossil finds have shown that Homo erectus had settled in many different parts of Eurasia between 1.8 and 1.2 million years ago. Based on such discoveries, and on the absence of Homo erectus fossils in Europe from later periods, it would seem they disappeared completely following the onset of the Early Pleistocene climate catastrophe.
Up to now it had been assumed that Homo erectus had disappeared gradually from Europe, perhaps because they chose to migrate to the east and south in search of warmer conditions or more abundant resources. Now it seems they never had the chance to leave, but were instead the victim of an unexpected environmental calamity...
A close look at the fossil record confirms that archaic human occupation of Europe was interrupted about 1.1 million years ago. From then until about 900,000 years ago, archaeologists and anthropologists have been unable to find much in the way of human remains or stone tools anywhere on the continent.
Once human ancestors returned, they remained on the continent in one form or another from that point on, which is notable because Ice Age cycles would plunge the lands of Europe into a deep freeze eight more times between 700,000 and 15,000 years ago.[/snip]Massive Climate Catastrophe Froze Europe's Earliest Humans to Death | Nathan Falde | August 12, 2023 | Ancient Origins dot net
“If they expect me to climb the freakin’ ladder, they shouldn’t make a twisted ladder!”
The Double Spiral Staircase by Charles Sheffield, Analog January 1990...
Sidebar — another “nah!” from 19 years ago.
Human populations are tightly interwoven
Michael Hopkin
Nature (2004)
Family tree shows our common ancestor lived just 3,500 years ago.
https://www.nature.com/articles/news040927-10
I was referring to the technology. They couldn’t perform such genome calculations 20 or even 10 years ago.
It’s modern processors which have opened the door to such studies and the ‘raw data’ is the genome itself.
LOL. I can’t argue with that. Hell, the paper stands a chance of being retracted next week, all things considered over the past few years.
Agreed. I’ve always scoffed internally at the failure of these researchers to link geological events to such.
Not tooting my own horn, but when I was a child and I read about the dinosaur deposits in the Midwest, I immediately looked at a map and imagined a comet impact in the Gulf of Mexico being responsible for a massive wave of destruction.
We now know the actual history with Chicxulub. When that discovery was published - and later validated - it was ‘one of those moments’, you know?
“They couldn’t perform such genome calculations 20 or even 10 years ago.”
Didn’t think of that.
Vaguely related: A week or so ago I got a minor cut on my hand. That got me thinking about how does my body know how to heal that wound? The tissue at the edge of the cut must become aware of the cut. Then it must manufacture tissue, meaning it must tell the bloodstream or someone to send it the ingredients for the repair. These tissues must know when they’re done.
This simple bodily function is mind boggling.
Agreed.
totally apart from his day job, he was an excellent sci-fi author. I have concluded that, like Hal Clement, the ‘builder’ artifacts in the related series he wrote were daydreams from his hard science profession that he decided to write stories around.
God pretty much considered all of that when he created our first ancestors, Adam, about 6 to 9 thousand years ago.
Try to explain that to whoever wrote "The Book Of Genesis", whether written 600 BC, or by Moses himself, or I suspect some combination of those, and you have... The Garden of Eden.
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