Hello everyone, It’s been a while since I’ve been down the peaceful science rabbit hole. I just stumbled across this paper which came out in August’s edition of Science stating that during the Pleistocene humans experienced a severe population bottleneck reducing our population to around 1200 breeding individuals. I know that in the past the number that has typically been cited based on current population genetics and genetic diversity is no fewer than 10,000 individuals. I was curious what everyone thought of this new paper.
Could you perhaps provide a citation to this paper?
I don’t have access to the article, just the abstract, but that’s a different bottleneck from the one previously talked about, which was much more recent. Note that it didn’t happen within H. sapiens but quite a long time before even the divergence of H. sapiens and H. neanderthalensis.
Yes that’s the article. I’m trying to get access to the full thing through inter library loan. Hoping to get it soon. yes with the date of 800-900kya that would have been before the split between sapiens and neanderthalensis but still within the Homo lineage.
If only there was some hub of science where one could find all paywalled articles for free…
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I recently discovered all citizens of Denmark have access to basically all journal articles through the Royal Danish Library. I just log in to rex.kb.dk using a personal digital ID app on my phone. I still haven’t come across something I didn’t have access to, including book chapters etc. Pretty neat!
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It’s an article in Science. The magazine. All of the municipal libraries I have used recently (Massachusetts and Arizona) have subscriptions. I’m astonished to learn of an institution of higher education that doesn’t. One needn’t turn to illegal repositories to read Science, and one needn’t visit Peaceful Science to learn that.
I was able to get a hard copy of the article at my university’s library. They just didn’t have a digital version because the article was so new.
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