Bereket Simmon, Meles Zenawi, Abay Woldu, Samora Yinus, Migbey Haile, Adisalem Balima and many of others direct link to their grandparents.
A reconstruction of [deleted] erectus at London’s Natural History Museum.
Humankind struggled to survive during a 100,000 year period during the early Pleistocene, according to researchers who used a computer model to discover a severe population bottleneck in our species’ ancient past.
The bottleneck occurred between 813,000 years ago and 930,000 years ago, and reduced an ancestral human species to less than 1,300 breeding individuals. The issue persisted for 117,000 years, and aligns with a chronological gap in the African and Eurasian human fossil records in that period. The team’s research on the bottleneck was published today in Science.
Population bottlenecks are events in which a species’ total population is severely reduced, which causes an overall reduction in genetic diversity across the species. The loss of genetic diversity can cause populations to become less healthy. Bioengineers can now synthesize genetic diversity in animal populations through cloning and gene editing.
But it’s not always the case that population bottlenecks threaten populations—look at the flightless, sexually inept kākāpō of New Zealand or the critically endangered vaquita porpoise, whose main threats are human-introduced threats and humankind itself, rather than small genetic pools. Now it appears that an ancestral human species may have been threatened by a similar culling of the population.