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from the we-are-all-one-big-happy-family dept.
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?
(Score: 4, Interesting) by bzipitidoo on Saturday November 04 2017, @09:50PM (2 children)
Surprised the summary didn't mention the massive eruption from the Toba supervolcano about 75000 years ago that may have pushed humans to the brink of extinction. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Toba_catastrophe_theory [wikipedia.org] I figured that with the 70000 years ago point in time, the article had to be about that eruption.
Some think Yellowstone might blow in the near future, with devastating, civilization ending consequences. I'm hopeful we can defuse it with geothermal energy generation, suck enough energy out of it to prevent it from ever erupting again.
(Score: 2) by Hartree on Sunday November 05 2017, @03:07AM
One of the big proponents of Toba being the cause of the bottleneck is Stan Ambrose at the University of Illinois Anthropology Department. He's an interesting sort. I've repaired a number of pieces of lab gear for him over the years. His main research is about the human diet in ancient times.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday November 05 2017, @12:41PM
The summary didn't but the article did mention it: http://www.npr.org/sections/krulwich/2012/10/22/163397584/how-human-beings-almost-vanished-from-earth-in-70-000-b-c [npr.org]