Human ancestors nearly died out between around 930,000 to 813,000 years ago in an evolutionarily pivotal population bust, a contested new study concludes.
This potential winnowing of human ancestors into a barely sustainable number of survivors coincided with a period of extreme cold and extended droughts in Africa and Eurasia, previous geologic evidence indicates.
If the new DNA-derived scenario holds up, relatively few survivors of the Stone Age big chill may have evolved into a species ancestral to Homo sapiens, Neandertals and Denisovans, say population geneticist Wangjie Hu of the Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai in New York City and colleagues. Previous analyses of DNA extracted from ancient fossils estimate that this common ancestral species appeared between around 700,000 and 500,000 years ago.
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