Experts from the Texas Health Science Center have found that about a million years ago, there were no more than 1,300 humans on Earth. The results of the study have been published magazine Science.
This effect is called a “bottleneck”, it is a decrease in the gene pool of the population due to the passage of a period of critical reduction in its number for various reasons.
In the study, the scientists used a new method called FitCoal to estimate the size of the human population in the past. Using modern genomic sequences from 3,154 individuals, they were able to accurately track demographic changes throughout history.
“The results showed that human ancestors experienced a population bottleneck with the breeding of about 1,280 individuals about 930,000 to 813,000 years ago. This “bottleneck” lasted about 117,000 years, and human ancestors were on the verge of extinction, the study’s authors said.
According to experts, a sharp cooling was observed at that time. There is also a theory that multiple meteor strikes could lead to such a reduction in population.
The study’s authors also suggested that it was the transition from the “bottleneck” that contributed to the division of the Homo genus.
Earlier archaeologists to create There is a 3000-year-old priest’s tomb, the first of its kind, in Peru.