An ‘ancestral bottleneck’ took out nearly 99 percent of the human population 800,000 years ago

Dec 10, 2024

An ‘ancestral bottleneck’ took out nearly 99 percent of the human population 800,000 years ago

Posted by Arthur Brown in category: futurism

A team of scientists from the United States, Italy, and China may have finally explained a large gap in the African and Eurasian fossil record. According to a model in a study published August 31 in the journal Science, the population of human ancestors crashed between 800,000 and 900,000 years ago. They estimate that there were only 1,280 breeding individuals alive during this transition between the early and middle Pleistocene. About 98.7 percent of the ancestral population was lost at the beginning of this ancestral bottleneck that lasted for roughly 117,000 years, according to the study.