dtucker300 Loc: Vista, CA

The Year 2024 if Democrats retain control of the Government.

https://www.cnn.com/2023/09/05/world/ancient-human-population-collapse-scn/index.html?utm_source=recommendedreads.com

Scientists say they have pinpointed the moment humanity almost went extinct
Katie Hunt
By Katie Hunt, CNN
Published 12:31 PM EDT, Tue September 5, 2023
The cranium and mandible of Homo heidelbergensis (500,000 years ago) is seen at the Museum of Human Evolution of Burgos July 12, 2010, before its inauguration on Tuesday. The Museum of Human Evolution is the only one in the world with 200 original human fossils, according to Antonio Jose Mencia, the museum's director of communication. REUTERS/Felix Ordonez (SPAIN - Tags: SOCIETY)
The cranium and mandible of Homo heidelbergensis, a species of ancient human that lived around 500,000 years ago, is shown.
Felix Ausin Ordonez/Reuters
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CNN
—
Ancient humanity was almost wiped out about 900,000 years ago when the global population dwindled to around 1,280 reproducing individuals, according to a new study. What’s more, the population of early human ancestors stayed this small for about 117,000 years.

Mandatory Credit: Photo by Shutterstock (515009di)
The skull of a newly discovered species of human - Homo Floresiensis. Believed to be living 18,000 years ago, barely a metre tall with a skull the size of a grapefruit. The partial skeleton was discovered on the Indonesian island of Flores - 27 Oct 2004
VARIOUS
The remarkable fossil that radically changed our understanding of the human story
The analysis, published August 31 in the journal Science, is based on a new computer model developed by a group of scientists based in China, Italy and the United States.

The statistical method used genetic information from 3,154 present-day human genomes.

Around 98.7% of human ancestors were lost, according to the study. The researchers argue that the population crash correlates with a gap in the fossil record, possibly leading to the emergence of a new hominin species that was a common ancestor of modern humans, or Homo sapiens, and Neanderthals.

“The novel finding opens a new field in human evolution because it evokes many questions, such as the places where these individuals lived, how they overcame the catastrophic climate changes, and whether natural selection during the bottleneck has accelerated the evolution of human brain,” said senior author Yi-Hsuan Pan, an evolutionary and functional genomicist at East China Normal University, in a statement.

The population bottleneck coincided with dramatic changes in climate during what’s known as the mid-Pleistocene transition, the research team suggested. Glacial periods became longer and more intense, leading to a drop in temperature and very dry climatic conditions.

Moreover, the scientists suggested that the control of fire, as well as the climate shifting to be more hospitable for human life, could have contributed to a later rapid population increase around 813,000 years ago.


The earliest evidence of the use of fire to cook food dates from 780,000 years ago in what is now modern-day Israel, the authors noted.

While ancient DNA has revolutionized our understanding about past populations, the oldest DNA from a human species dates to around 400,000 years ago.

The computer model uses the vast amount of information contained in modern human genomes about genetic variation over time to infer the size of populations at specific points in the past. The team used genetic sequences from 10 African and 40 non-African populations.

‘Provocative’ study
In a commentary on the analysis published in the same journal, Nick Ashton, curator of the Paleolithic collections at the British Museum, and Chris Stringer, research leader in human evolution at the Natural History Museum in London, described the study as “provocative.”

The two researchers, who were not involved in the study, said it brought “the vulnerability of early human populations into focus.”

A reconstruction of Homo naledi's head by paleoartist John Gurche, who spent some 700 hours recreating the head from bone scans. The find was announced by the University of the Witwatersrand, the National Geographic Society and the South African National Research Foundation and published in the journal eLife.
Photo by Mark Thiessen/National Geographic
Mysterious species buried their dead and carved symbols 100,000 years before humans
However, Ashton and Stringer said that the fossil record, while sparse, did show that early human species lived in and outside Africa about 813,000 to 930,000 years ago — during the period of proposed population collapse, with fossils from that era found in what’s now China, Kenya, Ethiopia, Italy, Spain and the United Kingdom.

“Whatever caused the proposed bottleneck may have been limited in its effects on human populations outside the Homo sapiens lineage or its effects were short-lived,” the two researchers said in the commentary.

“The proposed bottleneck needs to be tested against human and archaeological evidence,” they added.

Jim0001 Loc: originally from Tennessee, now Virginia, USA

I bet it was climate change.

dtucker300 Loc: Vista, CA

"The population bottleneck coincided with dramatic changes in climate during what’s known as the mid-Pleistocene transition, the research team suggested. Glacial periods became longer and more intense, leading to a drop in temperature and very dry climatic conditions."

Canuckus Deploracus Loc: North of the wall

Which is why we're so horribly inbred..

F.D.R.

Well now I know where the missing page from my ancestral history went. Distant ancestor Oark was in charge of the census that year and turned it in on July 16th and the figure was actually 1,347. Oh, and 6 women were pregnant at the time of the census. Happy to clear that up for everyone.

dtucker300 Loc: Vista, CA

The same people in charge of counting ballots.

TruePatriot49 Loc: The Democratic People's Republic Rhode Island

Speak for yourself.

Canuckus Deploracus Loc: North of the wall

Homo sapiens are all very closely related...
We have very little variation in our gene pool...

dtucker300 Loc: Vista, CA

Margarine has only one molecule difference from plastic. (let's see how many pick up on this)