Once, we were endangered.
Entered By: grantb on January 26, 2010
No Observations
SciAm puts us back in our place with the revelation from our DNA that humans used to be rarer than mountain gorillas:
[A]ccording to scientists from the University of Utah, about a million years ago our ancestors numbered fewer than 20,000. The estimate appears in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.
…One particular transposon first appeared about a million years ago. And by seeing where these sequences now sit, scientists can get a sense of the size of the breeding population back then.
Tags: archaeology, genetics
