Surviving the 900,000-year Ancestral Population Bottleneck: Implications of Major Climate Change

2023-09-02 14:34:37

900,000 years ago, humans would have come very close to extinction, according to a study. The terrestrial population then fell to only 1300 individuals. This event would have occurred during a period of major climate change.

Chinese scientists, whose study was published Thursday in Science magazine, used genetics to calculate that the world population entered a bottleneck 900,000 years before our era.

This decline coincides with major climatic changes: a long glaciation and a long period of drought in Africa and Eurasia.

Before this climate crisis, there were approximately 100,000 human beings on Earth. Then suddenly almost 99% of the population disappeared. There were only 1,300 individuals left capable of reproducing.

bottleneck

Compared to other living primates, contemporary man has very low genetic diversity, explains the journal Science. For decades, researchers suspected this was because our ancestors suffered a demographic bottleneck.

Scientists have therefore cross-checked the DNA of several contemporary populations to estimate the sizes of ancestral populations. However, researchers are now waiting for archaeological and fossil evidence to confirm this bottleneck theory.

Bastien Confino/edel

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