Jakarta – Humans almost became extinct about 1 million years ago. At that time, the world’s population was only about 1,300 for more than 100 years.
According to a study, this near-extinction event may have played a big role in the evolution of modern humans and their closest extinct relatives, namely the thick-browed Neanderthals and the mysterious Denisovans.
Previous studies have shown that modern humans originated around 300,000 years ago in Africa. With so few fossils from that period, there is still a lot of uncertainty about how the human lineage evolved before modern humans appeared.
To learn more about the near period of modern human evolution, the scientists investigated the genomes of more than 3,150 modern humans today from 10 African populations and 40 non-African populations.
The researchers developed a new analytical tool to infer the size of the groups that made up the ancestors of modern humans by looking at the diversity of genetic sequences seen in their offspring.
Genetic data shows that between 813 thousand and 930 thousand years ago, the ancestors of modern humans experienced a severe ‘bottleneck’, namely the loss of around 98.7% of their breeding population.
“Our ancestors experienced such a severe population stall over a very long time that they faced a high risk of extinction,” said study co-author Wangjie Hu of the Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai, New York City, quoted by Live Science.
This article has been published on detikInet, read in full here.
(mso/mso)
2023-09-06 02:31:50
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