by Genomic inference of a severe human bottleneck during the Early to Middle Pleistocene transition
Population size history is essential for studying human evolution. However, ancient population size history during the Pleistocene is notoriously difficult to unravel. In this study, we developed a fast infinitesimal time coalescent process (FitCoal) to circumvent this difficulty and calculated the composite likelihood for present-day human genomic sequences of 3154 individuals. Results showed that human ancestors went through a severe population bottleneck with about 1280 breeding individuals between around 930,000 and 813,000 years ago. The bottleneck lasted for about 117,000 years and brought human ancestors close to extinction. This bottleneck is congruent with a substantial chronological gap in the available African and Eurasian fossil record. Our results provide new insights into our ancestry and suggest a coincident speciation event.
It's the explanation for that gap which is most interesting! Plus it ties in with many common ancestral genes, such as MC1R. This bottleneck probably can be considered as a strong causal element in the specific evolutionary path of our species, both in terms of removing 'competing' branches, and also in creating a basal suite of genes particular to later species of human ancestors including us.
