Population collapse almost wiped out human ancestors, say scientists

This is the best summary I could come up with:

“The numbers that emerge from our study correspond to those of species that are currently at risk of extinction,” said Prof Giorgio Manzi, an anthropologist at Sapienza University of Rome and a senior author of the research.

Prof Chris Stringer, the head of human origins at the Natural History Museum in London, who was not involved in the research, said: “It’s an extraordinary length of time.

The decline appears to coincide with significant changes in global climate that turned glaciations into long-term events, a decrease in sea surface temperatures, and a possible long period of drought in Africa and Eurasia.

However, Stringer said there was not convincing evidence for a global “blank” in the fossil record of early humans, raising the possibility that whatever caused the bottleneck was a more local phenomenon.

This is probably due to the ancestors of those of non-African heritage having in effect undergone a more recent population bottleneck during the out-of-Africa migration, which would be expected to mask the earlier event.

The timing roughly coincides with when the last shared ancestor with Neanderthals and another ancient human species, the Denisovans, are believed to have roamed the Earth.

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