How Ancient Humans Survived Near Extinction 1 Million Years Ago

According to a recently published study, this massive hominin migration was most likely a response to the first major glaciation of the Pleistocene epoch, as well as an associated population collapse, which coincided perfectly with the exodus - and may reveal one of the most important events in human evolution. Human Species' genomes can contain evidence of times when organisms experienced severe bottlenecks, reducing their population to a small fraction of its previous size.

In the case of humanity, the bottleneck occurred among an ancestor, most likely Homo erectus erectus, long before we existed as a species, but the legacy is still present. Furthermore, during this bottleneck, two ancestral chromosomes are thought to have fused to form chromosome 2 in humans around 900,000 to 740,000 years ago. As a result, the ancient severe bottleneck may have marked a speciation event that resulted in the emergence of the Last Common Ancestor shared by Denisovans, Neanderthals, and modern humans, whose divergence was estimated to have occurred between 765,000 and 550,000 years ago. However, when it comes to determining the timing of the event, geneticists and paleontologists disagree, with competing papers proposing different dates.

Resolving the question is critical because determining the cause of the extinction is nearly impossible without knowing when it occurred. New research claims to have resolved the contradiction and found evidence for an unidentified human migration in the process. The study states, The timing and causes of hominin migrations out of Africa have been of recent interest. Two scenarios, one based on modern genomic data and the other on the chronology of hominin sites, suggest population bottlenecking in the Early Pleistocene. An ice age is invoked as a bottleneck trigger in both cases, despite the fact that they differ in timing and thus in the actual event that caused depopulation.

CHAPTERS
0:00 THE EXTINCTION EVENT
5:00 HUMANS IN EURASIA
10:00 OUT OF JAVA?