[Rockhounds] Hominids nearly went extinct 900,000 years ago

[Dora Smith]

Thanks for the link to the preprint.  

What occurs to me is that there is a known genetic bottleneck where humans were reduced to 5000 or so breeding pairs about 65,000 years ago, corresponding to the Toba supereruption - which was larger than Yellowstone's notorious supereruptions.   It is not clear if this is the same genetic bottleneck or a different one, nor how they established the time frame.

It also isn't clear what the actual consequence was.    A million years ago, human species were still sorting themselves out.  Rapid climate changes, which could cause specific places to go from wet to dry and warm to cold and back again often and quickly, forced hominids to become more adaptive and pushed human intelligence.   It has been thought ofr a long time that this drove human evolution.   It would have caused other hominid species to go extinct, and could not have done its evolutionary work if it had not also stressed our own ancestral population.    We must also keep in mind the mounting evidence that modern humans are as much the product of interbreeding among the hominid lineages as direct line evolution and competition between teh lineages.   

So in short I'm not sure what this tells us that we didn't already know.  It also isn't clear they know what genetic bottleneck and in what time frame they are talking about.

Yours,
Dora Smith







 On Friday, September 1, 2023 at 01:05:26 PM CDT, Paul <etchplain at att.net> wrote:





 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.
Anna Ikarashi, Nature News, August 31, 2023
https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-023-02712-4

Humanity’s Ancestors Nearly Died Out, Genetic Study Suggests
The population crashed following climate change about 930,000
years ago, scientists concluded. Other experts aren’t convinced
by the analysis. Carl Zimmer, New York Times, August 31, 2023
https://www.nytimes.com/2023/08/31/science/human-survival-bottleneck.html

The PDF of the preprint of the paper is at:

Hu, W., Hao, Z., Du, P., Di Vincenzo, F., Manzi, G., Pan,
Y.H. and Li, H., 2021. Genomic inference of a human
super bottleneck in Mid-Pleistocene transition. bioRxiv, pp.2021-05.
https://www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1101/2021.05.16.444351v3.abstract

The paywalled paper is at:

Hu, W., Hao, Z., Du, P., Di Vincenzo, F., Manzi, G., Pan,
Y.H. and Li, H., 2021. Genomic inference of a human
super bottleneck in Mid-Pleistocene transition.
Science, 381(6661), pp. 979-984.
https://www.science.org/doi/10.1126/science.abq7487

Yours,

Paul H.
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