However it happened, it took a toll on the human population. As such, they’re genetic mile markers in individuals—signs that they have traveled a certain distance together. Scientists found According to the Chad Huff, a co-author of the study, this might not have been a population anomaly. A cave called PP13B, near Pinnacle Point in South Africa,The survival lesson of this one is two-fold: it pays to be smart, but also location, location, location.About 70,000 years ago, Sumatra blew apart.

While some believe that it created a series of bottlenecks that turned humans into the weird and wild bunch we are today, others think it meant a few crappy years that left humanity essentially unchanged. And the first signs of civilisation arose from the ashes.Human society began to evolve away from nomadic hunters towards farming communities about 12,000 years ago. Picture: WikimediaGENETICS can reveal many buried secrets. They helped themselves along, though. Now scientists are beginning to explore why.AU WA: Piece of World's Oldest Axe Found in Western Australia's Kimberley Region May 11Tribalism among stone-age clans may have produced a brutal worldwide series of wars some 7000 years ago, the carnage of which lingers in our genes. The temperature dropped in the winter, and then dropped in the summer as well. Possibly this happened intentionally as groups had to leave or were driven out of shrinking habitable areas, or possibly it happened by chance as what had been a continuous habitable range of territory shrank to little pockets of land. Now they had to contend with multiple years of winter and an atmosphere full of noxious gases. SOME 7000 years ago, men became such a rarity that there was only one fertile male to mate with every 17 women. Scientists were looking for it because it separated “old DNA” from “new DNA.” According to the study, “the genealogy of a region that contains a mobile element is on average older than that of the rest of the genome. It might have been humanity’s normal state.

The era is officially called Marine Isotope Stage 6 (because we know of its existence in part by analyzing oxygen isotopes from deep sea sediment samples), and informally called a “glacial stage,” but it was likely Humans in Africa split up.

There are three times in history during which humans nearly went extinct. Here’s what threatened us, and how we survived.Mobile genetic elements are little sequences of DNA that don’t stay put. Glaciers expanded. It was called the ‘founder effect’, where a small number of individuals keep moving to establish new settlements.Europe, Asia, Africa and the Middle East may have been consumed by carnage between 5000 and 7000 years ago. What would happen if humans became extinct? Entire habitats were destroyed. The Toba idea is hotly contested. And as clans had begun to settle in one place, intruders were unwelcome.Such groups evolved systems of organisation based on family membership — generally focused on the male chief of the clan. Today it looks like humans will have to launch themselves into space to get enough room for our collective population, but we weren’t always so robust a species. This, in turn, promotes a sense of difference and competition with separate nearby clans.The researchers say these pressures came to a head shortly before the first civilisation emerged in Sumeria about 4000 years ago.“The presence of such groups results in violent intergroup competition preferentially taking place between members of male descent groups, instead of between unrelated individuals,” the researchers write.“Casualties from intergroup competition then tend to cluster among related males, and group extinction is effectively the extinction of lineages.”Essentially, the victorious clans would exterminate their opponent’s menfolk to ensure ongoing dominance and the eradication of potential competition.

This result came as a surprise because other evidence indicated that humans were doing very well. It’s much easier to copy and paste these elements than delete them, so once they’re in a gene, they tend to stay. They establish a strong group identity. In this case, it may have revealed that men almost exterminated themselves some 7000 years ago. Between the two, humans managed to gather enough food to get by. Steven Ambrose, a proponent of the idea of the Toba eruption as a cataclysmOr possibly not. This photo gives some hints: the abandoned Pripyat amusement park, in Pripyat, Ukraine. 5 Times Humans Came Close To Extinction Top5s. Some believe that the human breeding population The ones that did survive got both lucky and smart. To leave such a stark genetic imprint behind, as many as 9.5 million men must have been killed.The Stanford University team blames “competition between patrilineal kin groups”.Clans form from common ancestors. If that’s the case, then the survival lesson is clear: stay put.Around 195,000 years ago, the world changed. Because genealogies that contain polymorphic mobile elements are old, they are shaped largely by the forces of ancient population history and are insensitive to recent demographic events, such as bottlenecks and expansions.”They read humanity’s history on its genes, and it seems that 1.2 million years ago, things weren’t looking good. Suddenly, they had possessions. If Toba had as much of an impact as some people believe it did, from one year to the next, people were living in a different world.