Human ancestors may have survived a brush with extinction 900,000 years ago

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https://www.science.org/content/article/human-ancestors-may-have-survived-brush-extinction-900-000-years-ago

By ELIZABETH PENNISI, Science. 

Excerpt: About 1 million years ago, our distant ancestors hunted in small bands and gathered their food with sophisticated stone tools. Then, about 900,000 years ago, something happened: The number of breeding individuals dwindled to only about 1300, according to a new study modeling ancient population sizes. Our ancestors came within a hair’s breadth of extinction, and populations remained that low for the next 100,000 years or more, researchers argue today in Science. ...Janet Kelso, a computational biologist at the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology, is skeptical. She notes that the genetic signal for the bottleneck is strongest only in present-day African populations, and not in people who today live outside Africa.... The conclusions, “though intriguing, should probably be taken with some caution and explored further,” she says.....

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