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.

boem@lemmy.world · 1 年前

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.

Kbobabob@lemmy.world · 1 年前

I mean, the biblical version is just two… and their three sons.

Crow@lemmy.world · 1 年前

Until they wandered around and miraculously found more people that were never explained how they survived.

PeepinGoodArgs@reddthat.com · 1 年前

Close enough!

Chocrates@lemmy.world · 1 年前

I feel like we knew this years ago. Is this another way of confirming it?

EnglishMobster@kbin.social · edit-2 1 年前

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.

Chocrates@lemmy.world · 1 年前

Ooh thanks, I did not know this!

Chetzemoka@kbin.social · 1 年前

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/Toba_catastrophe_theory

Chocrates@lemmy.world · 1 年前

Fascinating!

Pat12@lemmy.world · 1 年前

We’re all a combination of 1280 individuals !?

possibly a cat@lemmy.ml · edit-2 1 年前

deleted by creator

redballooon@lemm.ee · 1 年前

And future

MxM111@kbin.social · 1 年前

Plus mutations

PixTupy@lemmy.ml · 1 年前

Hey cousin.

some_guy@lemmy.sdf.org · 1 年前

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.