Climate jeopardizes the future of humanity, and the same factor our species is one step away from extinction less than a million years ago. A research team from China, Italy and the USA shed light on hitherto unexplained data in the fossil records of Africa and Eurasia. through a novel Method named FitCoal Thanks to the rapid assembly process in an extremely small amount of time, the scientists were able to pinpoint demographic inferences from the existing human genomic sequences of 3,154 individuals.
Their conclusions show that early human ancestors went through a long and severe bottleneck approximately. 1,280 breeding individuals they managed to maintain a population for about 117,000 years.
Although this research has revealed some aspects of ancestry, Early to mid-PleistoceneThere are still many questions to be answered since this knowledge was discovered.
genetic analysis
In this study published in the journal ScienceNumerous genomic sequences were analyzed. However, the lead author of the scam says, “The fact that FitCoal can detect the old serious bottleneck with even a few sequences represents a major breakthrough”: Yun Xin FuD., a population geneticist at the University of Texas Health Sciences Center in Houston (USA).
Results from this state-of-the-art methodology used to calculate the probability of existing genome sequences show that early human ancestors experienced extreme loss of life and thus genetic diversity.
” The gap in the fossil record of Africa and Eurasia It can be explained by this bottleneck in the Early Stone Age. “This matches the proposed time period when fossil evidence was significantly lost,” he says. Giorgio ManziAnthropologist from Sapienza University of Rome (Italy).
adverse weather conditions
Suggested reasons for this ancestral population decline Humans are primarily climatic: glaciations during this period caused changes in temperatures, severe droughts, and potentially the loss of other species used as food sources by ancestral humans.
It is estimated that 65.85% of the existing genetic diversity may have been lost due to this bottleneck in the early and middle Pleistocene and the long-lasting minimum number of breeding individuals. threatened humanity as we know it today. However, it also appears to have contributed to an event of speciation, where two ancestral chromosomes combine to form what is now known as chromosome 2 in modern humans. With this knowledge, the last common ancestor of Denisovans, Neanderthals, and modern humans was potentially discovered (Homo sapiens).
“New invention opens a new discovery New field in human evolution because it raises many questions, such as where these individuals lived, how they coped with catastrophic climate changes, and whether natural selection accelerated the evolution of the human brain during the downturn,” he argues. Yi Hsuan PanAlso from East China Normal University, who participated in the research, Dr.
There is now reason to believe that something has happened. old struggle Researchers can dig deeper to answer these questions for survival 930,000 to 813,000 years ago, and to uncover how such a small population possibly survived under difficult and dangerous conditions.
HE fire controlAlong with climate change towards a climate more suitable for human habitation, around 813,000 years ago, it may have contributed to a later rapid population growth.
“These findings are just the beginning. With these insights, future goals are to paint a more complete picture of human evolution during this transitional period from the Early Pleistocene to the Middle Pleistocene, which will continue to unravel the mystery of ancestry and evolution.” human evolution” concludes: LI HaipengHe is a theoretical population geneticist and computational biologist at the Shanghai Institute of Nutrition and Health of the Chinese Academy of Sciences.
Reference work: https://www.science.org/doi/10.1126/science.abq7487
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