According to a study, just 1,280 nearly extinct humans are responsible for your existence.

1,280 nearly extinct humans are responsible for your existence.

In a recent study, a team of scientists claimed that there had been a “severe bottleneck” in the humans population chain, one that had nearly wiped out the human race 930,000 years ago when there were just 1,280 breeding individuals left. The study was published in the journal Science.
The multinational scientific team, blaming glacial events for the abrupt end of life between 930,000 and 813,000 years ago, asserts that they have developed a “novel method”—the quick infinitesimal time coalescent process—that allows them to properly calculate demographic trends.

According to the new findings, there was a severe population bottleneck that occurred approximately 117,000 years ago. This bottleneck would have destroyed nearly all Pleistocene forebears, or 98.7% of the population, before humans could truly flourish. This indicates that the 1,280 people listed in the study are the ancestors of all living humans today.

Giorgio Manzi, senior author and anthropologist from Sapienza University in Rome, stated in a news release that “this bottleneck in the Early Stone Age can be explained by the gap in the African and Eurasian fossil records as chronologically.” “It aligns with this postulated period of notable depletion of fossil evidence.”

However, not everyone is persuaded.

Nicholas Ashton, a paleolithic archaeologist at the British Museum who was not involved in the study, responds, “The hypothesis of a global crash does not fit in with the archaeological and human fossil evidence,” as reported by Science. “There are still unanswered questions about what caused the bottleneck and what caused the expansion after 120,000 years.”

According to the study’s authors, glacial events destroyed species that may have served as food supplies for early humans, altered temperature patterns, and brought about droughts—all things that would have made life on Earth challenging. They are unable to explain the subsequent sharp increase in population.
According to the scientists, an estimated 65 percent of genetic variety may have been lost during the early to middle Pleistocene age, which corresponds with the extended time of minimum breeding individuals.

Additionally, the findings raise the possibility that a population squeeze aided in the distinction between modern humans, Denisovans, and Neanderthals.

Yi-Hsuan Pan, senior author and evolutionary and functional genomics researcher at East China Normal University, said in a news release that “the novel finding opens a new field in human evolution because it evokes many questions, such as the places where these individuals lived, how they overcame the catastrophic climate changes, and whether natural selection during the bottleneck has accelerated the evolution of human brain.”

However, group leader for population genetics at Germany’s Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology Stephan Schiffels suggests that the findings’ precision may be stretched. He expressed his “strong skepticism” to AFP on the research’s ability to identify numbers with such precision, stating that it is “impossible” for a study this old to be precise to that extent.

The new study uses a recently developed computational model to travel back in time and demonstrate that early human ancestors experienced extreme loss of life and genetic variety. The model looks at 3,154 modern-day human genomic sequences while extrapolating genetic mutations.

Schiffels also mentioned that no other models have demonstrated a population fall and that the data utilized in the study is not brand-new, according to AFP.

According to Janet Kelso, a computational biologist at the Max Planck Institute, the genetic evidence supporting this bottleneck hypothesis is strongest among contemporary African groups, suggesting that it may not be as ubiquitous as the authors claim. This implies that a bottleneck of any kind would most likely have been restricted to a few ancestral populations. “Though intriguing, the conclusions should probably be taken with some caution and explored further,” the author states.
The report was deemed “unconvincing” by population geneticists, or those in the field, according to Aylwyn Scalley, a researcher in human evolutionary genetics at Cambridge University, who spoke with AFP.

Francis Crick Institute’s Pontus Skoglund told AFP that he concurs with the others who are doubting the results. “It is difficult to be persuaded by the conclusion,” he remarks.

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A Study Says You Owe Your Existence to Just 1,280 Humans Who Almost Went Extinct (msn.com)