A Massive Asteroid Caused a Human Mass Extinction Bottleneck 800,000 Years Ago

One day, in the late Pleistocene, an asteroid estimated to be 1.2 miles across split the sky over modern-day Southeast Asia. The gigantic space rock came in at a shallow angle, gouging out a crater more than 10 miles wide, and showering the surrounding region with debris. This sounds like science fiction but it is not.

At the dawn of humanity 800,000 years ago, the massive cosmic event reshaped the Earth’s environment and, potentially, the evolutionary trajectory of early human species. The Australasian impact event, which created the largest known tektite strewnfield, has been linked to widespread environmental upheavals. This video explores the hypothesis that the comet impact triggered climatic and ecological shifts that led to the speciation of Denisovans, Neanderthals, and Homo sapiens.

CHAPTERS:
0:00 A COSMIC IMPACT 800,000 YEARS AGO
5:30 EVOLUTIONARY BOTTLENECKS
7:00 A GEOMAGNETIC REVERSAL
10:00 THE DIVERGENCE OF HUMAN LINEAGES

SOURCES:
'Australasian impact crater buried under the Bolaven volcanic field, Southern Laos' https://www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/pnas...
'Early Quaternary global terrestrial impact of a whole comet in the Australasian tektite field, newest apparent evidences discovery from Thailand and East Asia'
https://gsm.org.my/wp-content/uploads...