population collapsed by 98.7 percent to 1,300
image above from X(Twitter) links to tweet it came from
subhead of Smithsonian Magazine article cited in tweet:
A study proposes that the population that gave rise to modern humans may have been reduced to roughly 1,300 reproducing individuals
from the article:
The study, published [2023-08-31] in Science, analyzed the genetic lineages of 3,154 modern humans to trace their characteristics backward in time and model the population patterns likeliest to have produced their existing genomes. Wangjie Hu, of the Chinese Academy of Sciences, and colleagues suggest that between 813,000 and 930,000 years ago the population of ancient humans that would eventually give rise to our own species, Homo sapiens, experienced what geneticists call a “bottleneck.” For unknown reasons, perhaps difficult environmental conditions, their numbers plunged dramatically to a point where our lineage was within a whisper of total extinction. Based on the study’s estimates, some 98.7 percent of our human ancestors were wiped out.*
2023-09-16 / notes
*a link; see the about page for how posts – and copies on fw – use links
dates of genetic bottlenecks for antecedents of modern humans (!?)
further notes are not appended to posts on fewer wurdz