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How Human Beings Almost Vanished From Earth In 70,000 B.C.

posted by martyb on Saturday November 04 2017, @09:55AM   Printer-friendly
from the we-are-all-one-big-happy-family dept.

Phoenix666 writes:

Nearly Extinct:

Add all of us up, all 7 billion human beings on earth, and clumped together we weigh roughly 750 billion pounds. That, says Harvard biologist E.O. Wilson, is more than 100 times the biomass of any large animal that's ever walked the Earth. And we're still multiplying. Most demographers say we will hit 9 billion before we peak, and what happens then?

Well, we've waxed. So we can wane. Let's just hope we wane gently. Because once in our history, the world-wide population of human beings skidded so sharply we were down to roughly a thousand reproductive adults. One study says we hit as low as 40.

Forty? Come on, that can't be right. Well, the technical term is 40 "breeding pairs" (children not included). More likely there was a drastic dip and then 5,000 to 10,000 bedraggled Homo sapiens struggled together in pitiful little clumps hunting and gathering for thousands of years until, in the late Stone Age, we humans began to recover. But for a time there, says science writer Sam Kean, "We damn near went extinct."

Some of the survivors must have coupled with lizards. How else could there be so many lawyers today?

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  • (Score: 2) by takyon on Saturday November 04 2017, @02:59PM (2 children)

    by takyon (881) <takyonNO@SPAMsoylentnews.org> on Saturday November 04 2017, @02:59PM (#592179) Journal

    Have about 2/3 of the pop been starving themselves so equal out the numbers?

    A human can only starve themselves down to 0 kg or above from 75 kg.

    A human can engorge themselves up from 75 kg until they reach 635 kg.

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  • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday November 04 2017, @05:14PM (1 child)

    by Anonymous Coward on Saturday November 04 2017, @05:14PM (#592219)

    0kg? I assume that's a typo, but yes, this is very much a skewed distribution. Every person has a minimum possible weight before they completely starve to death. But, the maximum possible weight is much, much further away from the mean weight. And if you can convince people to bring you food while you swell up so large that you can't leave the house without removing a wall, it's possible to be many times the mean weight.

    Well, until the person has some sort of massive heart attack, stroke or just can't breath because the lungs can't lift the folds of fat.

    • (Score: 1, Interesting) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday November 04 2017, @06:19PM

      by Anonymous Coward on Saturday November 04 2017, @06:19PM (#592247)

      > 0kg?

      "between 0.00177 mg and 0.0042 mg" by another netizen's calculation [answers.com]