{"id":201198,"date":"2024-12-10T19:25:30","date_gmt":"2024-12-11T01:25:30","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/2024\/12\/an-ancestral-bottleneck-took-out-nearly-99-percent-of-the-human-population-800000-years-ago"},"modified":"2024-12-10T19:25:30","modified_gmt":"2024-12-11T01:25:30","slug":"an-ancestral-bottleneck-took-out-nearly-99-percent-of-the-human-population-800000-years-ago","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/2024\/12\/an-ancestral-bottleneck-took-out-nearly-99-percent-of-the-human-population-800000-years-ago","title":{"rendered":"An \u2018ancestral bottleneck\u2019 took out nearly 99 percent of the human population 800,000 years ago"},"content":{"rendered":"<p><a class=\"aligncenter blog-photo\" href=\"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog.images\/an-ancestral-bottleneck-took-out-nearly-99-percent-of-the-human-population-800000-years-ago2.jpg\"><\/a><\/p>\n<p>A team of scientists from the United States, Italy, and China may have finally explained a large gap in the <a href=\"https:\/\/www.popsci.com\/science\/stone-tools-humans-europe-migration\/\" target=\"_blank\">African and Eurasian fossil record<\/a>. According to a model in a <a href=\"https:\/\/www.science.org\/doi\/10.1126\/science.adj9484\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener nofollow\">study published August 31 in the journal <em>Science<\/em><\/a>, the population of human ancestors crashed between 800,000 and 900,000 years ago. They estimate that there were only 1,280 breeding individuals alive during this transition between the <a href=\"https:\/\/www.britannica.com\/science\/Pleistocene-Epoch\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener nofollow\">early and middle Pleistocene<\/a>. About 98.7 percent of the ancestral population was lost at the beginning of this ancestral bottleneck that lasted for roughly 117,000 years, according to the study.<\/p>\n<p><strong>[Related: <a href=\"https:\/\/link.popsci.com\/join\/79r\/signup-popsci\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener nofollow\">Want more eye-opening science stories? Sign up for a PopSci newsletter<\/a>.]<\/strong>.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>A team of scientists from the United States, Italy, and China may have finally explained a large gap in the African and Eurasian fossil record. According to a model in a study published August 31 in the journal Science, the population of human ancestors crashed between 800,000 and 900,000 years ago. They estimate that there [\u2026]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":692,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[20],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-201198","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-futurism"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/201198","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/692"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=201198"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/201198\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=201198"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=201198"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=201198"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}