Close call....

I found this article very interesting.

It states findings by Stanford University researchers on the Genographic Project that humans were nearly rendered extinct about 70,000* years ago, due to drought conditions in Africa. Left to a few small, scattered groups of individuals, perhaps only 2,000 in total, the human population was on the brink of dying out entirely.

Obviously that didn't happen, and somehow those small bands of people managed to survive and eventually grow the population and eventually expand out of Africa.

The rest, as they say, is history. There are now over 6.6 billion people on Earth.

Still, 70,000 years is not a long time in the lifespan of our 4.54 billion-year-old planet. (Takes 999,999,999 plus one years to make it to ONE billion....) It has seen countless extinctions of living things within the small time that there have been living things....what would one more snuffed species have meant?

Paleontologist Meave Leakey, a Genographic adviser, said: "Who would have thought that as recently as 70,000 years ago, extremes of climate had reduced our population to such small numbers that we were on the very edge of extinction?"

To us, a whole lot. To the planet, well.....looking at what we've managed to mess up recently maybe it would have been better for a lot of other creatures had things turned out differently.

Studying DNA from humans all over the world, the Genographic Project is hosted by the National Geographic Society and IBM and has managed to trace the movement and development of the human species back through its history. By studying mitochondrial DNA, which we all inherit in our cells from our mothers, they can learn how humans moved across the globe and where they came from, genetically. It doesn't tell you who your great-grandfather was, but it can map your ancestry on a ancient swatch of people who moved out of Africa and across Europe and Asia, tens of thousands of years ago.

What they have been able to find is a bottleneck of DNA variations, showing that everyone alive today bears some of the same genetic markers found in that small population of humans, 70,000 years ago, struggling to survive. It was a close call for humanity, but undeniably they became us. Genetically speaking, of course.

So what does this mean? To your commute home or what's for dinner, not much. But it shows that our world is a variable thing, and that we're subject to its whims just like anything else. And that we are all connected and related, however distantly. Evolution and environment may have changed how we look, but every DNA in each of our cells still remember where we came from, and how close we came to becoming just another extinction.

*Humans, as they define them, have been around something like 2.2 million years. This moves around as they discover new fossils and such, and the lines are blurry, but it's in that ballpark. Modern humans, like you, me, Rosie O' Donnell, Lou Ferrigno, and that guy who talks to the pigeons in the park, have been around for about 200,000 years.  Again, this is what the science guys tell me, and I tend to believe their impartial radioisotopic dating methods over the fairytales they read me in catechism class and parochial school. Call me faithless if you will, but the remains are here, and I have a hard time looking into the (reconstructed) face of a ancient human child and proclaiming "you didn't exist because you don't fit into our modern ideology."