Population collapse almost wiped out human ancestors, say scientists

RandAlThor@lemmy.ca to World News@lemmy.world – 188 points –
Population collapse almost wiped out human ancestors, say scientists
theguardian.com
23

People challenging the seriousness of the climate change are saying "we will adapt and survive like we always have".. Yeah, our "adapt and survive" could look like that.

People really don't understand what it will be like if society collapsed.. mad max is a future documentary at this point

Not really, the world of Mad Max appears to have an infinite amount of gas supply. This is very unlikely to happen in the real world.

I think it's more that the fuel supply we have on hand is now spread among a population that is 99% smaller. What would last us months lasts them decades.

This is the best summary I could come up with:


“The numbers that emerge from our study correspond to those of species that are currently at risk of extinction,” said Prof Giorgio Manzi, an anthropologist at Sapienza University of Rome and a senior author of the research.

Prof Chris Stringer, the head of human origins at the Natural History Museum in London, who was not involved in the research, said: “It’s an extraordinary length of time.

The decline appears to coincide with significant changes in global climate that turned glaciations into long-term events, a decrease in sea surface temperatures, and a possible long period of drought in Africa and Eurasia.

However, Stringer said there was not convincing evidence for a global “blank” in the fossil record of early humans, raising the possibility that whatever caused the bottleneck was a more local phenomenon.

This is probably due to the ancestors of those of non-African heritage having in effect undergone a more recent population bottleneck during the out-of-Africa migration, which would be expected to mask the earlier event.

The timing roughly coincides with when the last shared ancestor with Neanderthals and another ancient human species, the Denisovans, are believed to have roamed the Earth.


The original article contains 619 words, the summary contains 192 words. Saved 69%. I'm a bot and I'm open source!

A genomics analysis of more than 3,000 living people suggested that our ancestors’ total population plummeted to about 1,280 breeding individuals for about 117,000 years.

We were so close…so close…sigh

Too bad it didn't just do it. The planet and rest of life probably been better off.

Humans to the planet in 2023: "Should've killed me when you had the chance"

To true. We damn sure doing our best to destroy it. Of course planet will be fine unless you find a way to crack in half and I wouldn't put it past us.