Humans Nearly Went Extinct 70,000 Years Ago

Josh Fink brings us a CNN story discussing evidence found by researchers which indicates that humans came close to extinction roughly 70,000 years ago. A similar study by Stanford scientists suggests that droughts reduced the population to as few as 2,000 humans, who were scattered in small, isolated groups. Quoting: "'This study illustrates the extraordinary power of genetics to reveal insights into some of the key events in our species' history,' said Spencer Wells, National Geographic Society explorer in residence. 'Tiny bands of early humans, forced apart by harsh environmental conditions, coming back from the brink to reunite and populate the world. Truly an epic drama, written in our DNA.'"

The way things are going

we will actually reach that population level again.

Environmental damage here we come!

Re:The way things are going

we will actually reach that population level again. Environmental damage here we come!

Hear that Kelly Kapowski? Not if I was the last man on Earth, eh?

Re:The way things are going

The problem with global warming is three fold....

#1 it is unequally balanced..the temp changes more at the poles where the ecosystem is more sensitive to temperature. Therefore a small global change will mean dramatic changes in isolated areas.

#2 if you look through history, the average GLOBAL temperature over a one year period has typically hovered around 0 deg C for most of history. I hear that is an important temperature for something..... Anytime the temperature strays from freezing dramatic changes happen to the global environment.

#3 Consistency. So much of our modern society is based an the extremly mild conditions the earth has experienced over the last 20,000 years. Most of Europe is inhabitable ONLY because of the gulf stream and atlantic currents. Agriculture is ONLY possible because the temperature has been consistant year to year. We are in a sweet spot environmentally that is very unusual in earths history. screwing with the temperature is not going to help.

Re:The way things are going

How about the people who busily insist that can't possibly be anything other than a wholly human-caused phenomenon, and that we can definitely stop it. What if we can't? Plans, anyone?

Seriously, I want my interstellar settler permit and associated vehicle already...oh, wait...we can't even go to the moon anymore.

Re:The way things are going

Well if what we are doing right now is the best we can do, and we are causing global warming, then we are completely screwed.
Might as well give up now and save a few billion dollars.

I'm of the opinion that GW is natural and we are just giving it a teeny tiny push.
Next they'll blame the next ice age on human activity as well.

Re:The way things are going

In the 60's, greenies like myself fought against pollution from companies. If we had allowed the companies to continue, we would look FAR worse than parts of china or old USSR does today (and have significantly far worse health issues, akin to china's).
The global cooling issue was a 1 time tabloid issue. It was never in the science world other than 1 article. Only idiots point to that.
In the 80's, it was reagan trying to roll back the environmental changes (interestingly, the majority of the environmental laws esp EPA was from the pubs). It was the beginning of the ozone issue.
In the 90's, it was solving the Ozone issue. And just all the other ones was a problem. Fortunately, it is being saved because the freon was stopped. But we still have a hole in the south pole, that is slowly receding.

And since the 90's, global warming has been an issue. Back in the mid 90's, the neo-cons said that the earth is not warming. Now they say that man can not be behind the warming.

Do not buy it. Just quit polluting and forcing your shit on me and mine.

Re:The way things are going

The DDT ban was one of the most successful examples of environmental policy in our history.

I presume that you love America? And perhaps by extension that you love our national symbol, the bald eagle? Well the only reason you can see them in the wild today is because of the DDT ban. They are one of the few species to ever come back after being placed on the endangered species list, and it's directly due to environmental action. So I'd hope you'd show a little gratitude.

I've heard convincing arguments that an outright ban on DDT went too far, and allowing small-scale controlled usage would have been beneficial. However the large scale cause-and-effect of spewing tremendous amounts of DDT everywhere -> bald eagle populations dropping, and banning DDT -> bald eagle populations recovering is indisputable. We know it was the DDT; we could measure it in the corpses of their prematurely dead young.

Other than that... Global Cooling was not actually a mainstream theory. Pollution/Smog was a serious problem, ask anyone who lived in L.A. in the 80s and now compared to now thanks to their emissions regulations. The ban of CFCs has had a demonstrably positive effect on the condition of the ozone layer.

So you're basing your decision to not believe in Global Warming based on a series of things which mostly turned out to be completely true?

Good job!

Re:The way things are going

Good old fashion starvation and disease. For reference, see the current food prices and how these are liked in the developing world. Biofuel mania has something to do with it, but increased consumption by people and animals people eat is the major problem.

Yes, it's entirely possible to get crop failures leading to starvation. But how many deaths? 1M? 10M? Not even a small dent in human population.

The flaw in your thinking is very common -- it assumes a static world that does not adjust. If people are dying by the millions, then things will adjust. Hunger is by far a distribution problem, not a food production problem.

Re:The way things are going

Volcanism. With global warming, the melting of the polar ice will result in a major redistribution of mass. The planet will want to conserve angular momentum. Something will have to give.

Huh? I suggest going to look up the mass of the earth, compared to the mass of all the water. The mass of ALL the water is proportionally tiny, much less the mass of just the ice. Then try and remember that the world goes through periodic ice ages that redistribute water mass all the time.

Re:The way things are going

Just don't let him back out.

Damn those Cylons

I guess only 2,000 survivors made down to the planet's surface from the Battlestar Galactica. They should have listened to Starbuck earlier.

The concept of races

This event probably ended up establishing the concept of "races", meaning small groups of geographically isolated humans ended up having a lot of genetically distinct features. As their populations grew, they seemed very foreign to each other and only in modern times those barriers to gene flow seem to be falling.

I look forward to the day when people stop saying "I'm X race" and instead say "I carry the genetic markers for A, B, and C." Well, perhaps it's unlikely, but an ex-biologist can dream, can't he?

Re:The concept of races

Or perhaps instead of saying "I'm X race" just say "This is my speciality and these are my accomplishments!" Once you get to a certain average prosperity level worldwide, it eventually stops mattering.

Re:The concept of races

Speaking as an American, as long as dumbasses think they're special because some of their ancestors came from Ireland 8 generations ago before proceeding to mix with every other background in the US, we're going to hear a lot more "I'm Irish" or worse "I'm 1/16 Cherokee, 1/2 Irish, 2/7 Italian..." crap.

Conversation with government clerk....

Conversation with government clerk filling out official forms...

Clerk: Full name please?
Me: Allen Dale Douglas
Clerk: Date of Birth?
Me: June 12th, 1981
Clerk: Place of birth?
Me: In a hospital.
Clerk: Which city and state, Einstein?
Me: Oh, Dallas TX, Presbyterian Hospital
Clerk: Sex?
Me: Sometimes.
Clerk: (rolls eyes ) Sex?
Me: Male.
Clerk: Race?
Me: Human.
Clerk: No, I mean what ethnicity are you?
Me: Texan.
Clerk: (rolls eyes again, tosses pencil up into the air and walks away)

Re:The concept of races

Oh, it would have taken more than one such event, but we know that more than one such event occured. There have been other reports of other droughts nearly killing off humanity and the bottlenecks showing up in the DNA. Once humanity fragmented globally, however, mutations would have stayed reasonably local, and this also created races. (The two African tribes mentioned in the article formed from the drought mentioned and the Australian aborigines formed from early geographic isolation, making the three very special examples of humanity, but that should not lead anyone to conclude they should be treated as ouside humanity - they've a greater right to the title than most extremists.)

The rest of humanity spread out across the globe, the Genography project has some nice maps of how the genetic markers show humanity to have moved. They do make one error when it comes to Europe. Europe was settled at least twice - once by a long-headed hunter-gatherer people and then later by a rounder-headed farming people. The long-headed people are the ones who developed lactose tolerence and anyone who can digest cheese or milk in any quantity is descended from the long-heads. In order for that to make sense, the long-heads must have migrated with cattle or goats, much as many nomadic tribes do today. The Iron age "Ice Man" (central Europeans give them such boring names - at least Britain's bogman was called Pete Marsh) was, if I remember the description correctly, one of the round-headed people. He was also left-handed, but that probably doesn't signify anything of interest. He was either a trader or a trapper and there can't have been many tools in either trade that were designed with a specific hand in mind.

one arkload

Isn't 2000 people about the capacity of Golgafrinchan Ark Ship B?

Just saying...

If by 70,000 years ago

you mean 6000 years ago, and if by a drought you mean a flood, and if by 2000 human beings, you mean one bad-ass yachtsman named Noah and his hot wife Jessica Alba, then I would be inclined to agree. Otherwise I'm afraid this is just another godless article passed off as 'science' by Lucifer-worshipping scientists and their ilk over at CNN.

Seems a bit shaky to me

This whole article seems to rest on the premise that humans left Africa en masse about 60,000 years ago. This is likely, but still a hotly contested theory. A rival theory contends that modern humans (Homo sapiens sapiens) originated about the same time from Homo erectus, whose bones have been found in Asia and Africa (the multiregional theory).

It stands to reason that the tests on mitochondrial DNA of a group in Africa is only useful if you assume everyone left Africa sometime after 60,000 years ago.

Given there are numerous sites in Australia that claim to have artefacts stretching back at least that far (and possibly 176,000 years ago) it is very likely there were pockets of humans in other parts of the world much earlier than 60,000 years.

This research actually only shows that there is evidence of a population crash in Africa. Not that homo sapiens across the world had a population crash.

Re:Are we SO sure?

I have a whopping 10 mod points, but would rather participate in this discussion instead, so here goes:

I think that this is actually plausible. Things to mull over that could make this an interesting topic:

1) What evidence, 70000 years later, would decisively display the difference between a flood and a drought?

2) Could the Noah story be an allegory written after the fact to describe this event, with only the details mixed up? If so, what does that tell us about this story?

3) What remnants of an Ark would one expect to find 70000, or even 5000 years after the fact? Conversely, what evidence could be shown that would decisively PROVE OR DISPROVE that the event happened? And I'm talking about scientific evidence here. Not anecdotal faith-based cruft. Not even science-based faith-based cruft, if you please...

Love these topics. Go people, go!! :P

Re:Are we SO sure?

actually the whole almost dieing out thing just reeks of a total lack of intelligent design

Re:So...the Neanderthals could have wiped us out

Actually the study can't support the statement that there were only 2,000 of us at that time. What it does say is that only 2,000 of us alive at that time managed to pass down their genes until today. There might have been a larger population whose genes we have lost in the intervening time (e.g. during the Bubonic plague).

The problem with these studies is that there isn't any DNA record of the humans that didn't make it. The only evidence we could hope to find of the humans that have died out is fossilized remains, which are few and far between.

Re:So...the Neanderthals could have wiped us out

And now we're an over-weight, not-too-bright, not-too-strong, disease-ridden, sorry-assed bunch of H. Sapiens.

What a difference 70,000 years makes!

Re:Old News

Maybe it's because I pay attention to genetics and genealogy (and I thought people were geekier than I am here) but I clearly remember this news from 2006. Why is it getting recycled now, two years later?

The end of this article [nationalgeographic.com] seems to cover that. Basically, this is a completely independent set of data (taken from the Genographic Project) that further confirms a theory that's been kicking around for a while.

Re:The flood!

Floods typically do follow droughts.. so I wouldn't be surprised if an oral tradition was formed around how the global flood (which is a legend in most every culture) was passed on for 70,000 years or so.