Submitted by T. Smyth on Tue, 18/03/2025 - 10:35
Modern humans descended from not one, but at least two ancestral populations that drifted apart and later reconnected, long before modern humans spread across the globe.
A study published in Nature Genetics, co-authored Cambridge Reproduction member Aylwyn Scally, has discovered that modern humans descended from not one, but at least two ancestral populations that drifted apart and later reconnected, long before modern humans spread across the globe. He says, “Immediately after the two ancestral populations split, we see a severe bottleneck in one of them—suggesting it shrank to a very small size before slowly growing over a period of one million years”