Nearly a million years ago, some devastating event nearly wiped out humanity's ancestors.
. When a species is devastated by an event such as war, famine, or climate crisis, the resulting drop in genetic diversity can be traced through the progeny of the survivors. This is how we know that there was also a human population bottleneck in the Northern Hemisphere far more recently, someThe further back in time you want to look, however, the more challenging it becomes to tease out a meaningful signal.
For this latest analysis, the research team developed a new method called the fast infinitesimal time coalescent process to circumvent the accumulation of numerical errors usually associated with trying to unravel these past events. They used FitCoal to analyze the genomic data of 3,154 people from around the world, from 10 African and 40 non-African populations, looking at how gene lineages have diverged over time. Their results showed a significant population bottleneck from around 930,000 to 813,000 years ago, which saw a current genetic diversity loss of up to 65.85 percent.
As to what caused the bottleneck, we won't ever be 100 percent sure what all the contributing factors might have been, but there was one major event taking place at the time that could have played a role – theIt's possible that climate turmoil could have produced conditions that were not kind to the human populations scrabbling for survival at the time, resulting in famine and conflict that reduced population numbers further.
The bottleneck seems to have contributed to another interesting feature of the human genome: the fusion of two chromosomes to form
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