Did Humans Almost Go Extinct? | Random Thursday
70,000 years ago, the human population hit a major bottleneck, and scientists aren't exactly sure why.
One of the more popular explanations has been the Toba explosion, the massive explosion of the Toba supervolcano that occurred at roughly that same time, but has been mostly disproven.
DNA evidence shows that African populations, especially the ancient Khoi and San people of Africa, show far more genetic diversity than those who came out of Africa according to the "out of Africa" theory. The study showed that those that came out of Africa descended from between 1000 and 10,000 breeding pairs.
The reason for this remains a mystery.
First question (don't get me wrong), is that topic was recently mention by someone really important?
The reason why I am asking is... because just 6 days ago one of my favorites polish YouTuber ("Uwaga, Nałkowy Bełkot") made a video about exactly the same topic:
(I recommend it to all people from Poland)
But from your video I also learn about potential reason of this bottleneck :)
Dude, I don't know what's in the air but after I'd already recorded this, Sci Show did an episode on it and just the day before someone else (I want to say Seeker?) did it too. And apparently this guy. That just happens sometimes. I almost didn't release it for that reason but I figured what the hell.