[Ahban]

Re: Toba

If Toba is the cause of the bottleneck, how come only the genes of humans bottlenecked? No other primate has such a bottleneck. Two chimps from different groups living on the SAME MOUNTIAN in Africa have more genetic diversity than any two human beings alive.

Did it grealty reduce the human population, but not the chimp, bonobo, gorilla, or orangutan, or gibbon populations? That makes no sense to me at all. Two of those live EXCLUSIVLEY in Toba's neighborhood. Why do they not show a bottleneck?

If Toba ia the answer, why are only humans, among all primates, showing it?

[blam]

"If Toba ia the answer, why are only humans, among all primates, showing it?"

Don't know. What do you think.

[Ahban]

I don't know either, except that maybe Toba, bad as it was, did not bring any primate species alive today close to extinction. Human genes are so close simply because man himself is very recent- after Toba. Of course, if the dating of the fossil in your post holds up, mankind would be older.

Still, that skull looks completely modern - I suspect it is far more recent than the preliminary dating, based on sediments and not the skull itself, suggests. BTW Mungo Man may not be from so far back after all. VadeRetro, to his credit since it undermined his point, found a good link casting grave doubts on the 60K date for Mungo Man in favor of a much more recent date.