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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. (www.nature.com)

submitted 2 years ago by [email protected] to c/[email protected]

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[–] [email protected] 25 points 2 years ago (2 children)

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

[–] [email protected] 46 points 2 years ago* (last edited 2 years ago) (1 children)

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.

[–] [email protected] 7 points 2 years ago

Ooh thanks, I did not know this!

[–] [email protected] 19 points 2 years ago (1 children)

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

[–] [email protected] 4 points 2 years ago

Fascinating!