A study published last week in the journal Science reported that the population of human ancestors crashed between 800,000 and 900,000 years ago, dropping to about 1,280 breeding individuals during the early and middle Pleistocene era, which is associated with a severe cooling phase about 900,000 years ago. This represented a drop of about 98.7 percent of the ancestral population and lasted roughly 117,000 years. The climate was generally cold, and this era is best known for its massive ice sheets and glaciers that shifted around the planet and shaped many of the landforms we see on Earth today.  This was the time that modern humans spread outside of the African continents, and other human species, like Neanderthals, began to go extinct. The Australian continent and the Americas also saw humans for the first time. The team, composed of researchers from China, Italy, and the United States, used a fast infinitesimal time coalescent process (FitCoal) to determine ancient demographic inferences with modern-day human genomic sequences from 3,154 people. Fit Cioal projects current human genetic variation backward in time to estimate the size of populations at specific points in the past… (READ MORE)

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