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Relatedly, I find it interesting that humans may have nearly gone extinct (at least) at one point. There’s evidence that the species was reduced to about 1,300 breeding individuals some 900,000 years ago (following who knows what cataclysm or malign event). So even if we (our current civilisation) continue to fuck up the planet, there’s every chance that a random group of Amish or Sentinelese folks will survive to carry the species onwards. Perhaps they’d encode in myth how giants riding shining immortal horses used to roam the land.
I'm with the sceptics on this one. I think it shows too much confidence in the method, which simplifies things far too much, and will undoubtedly spawn many other papers. There's no doubt that larger populations were reduced dramatically again and again, by pandemics, natural disasters (the sheer number of inundated coastal settlements that we know about will be dwarfed by the number of those we don't know about), and, of course, humanity's favourite activities of warfare and genocide, sadly. Just one significant bottleneck is very unlikely.
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Oliver Schick
@Leshaches
Possibly remnants of a widely spread advanced civilisation that predates the Bronze Age but has been lost to the eons, and would have been unmatched anywhere on earth for thousands of years. Or something more recent but still pretty impressive.
I find it’s all too easy to slide into pseudo science and bs when reconciling the notion of properly advanced civilisations gone extinct with (most) contemporary scientists’ hubris about how we’re living the paramount moment of human existence. However, if we discard Victorian-like biases about strangers’ and ancestors’ capabilities, it seems ridiculous to cling onto the assertion that formed stone tools were used by hominids before Homo Erectus (potentially multiple millions of years ago), and somehow it’s only in the past 4 thousand years that humans developed something better. The argument that it’s because humans took that long to develop agriculture is equally absurd if scientifically still accurate, given how important food security has always been.
Relatedly, I find it interesting that humans may have nearly gone extinct (at least) at one point. There’s evidence that the species was reduced to about 1,300 breeding individuals some 900,000 years ago (following who knows what cataclysm or malign event). So even if we (our current civilisation) continue to fuck up the planet, there’s every chance that a random group of Amish or Sentinelese folks will survive to carry the species onwards. Perhaps they’d encode in myth how giants riding shining immortal horses used to roam the land.
https://www.science.org/content/article/human-ancestors-may-have-survived-brush-extinction-900-000-years-ago#:~:text=About%201%20million%20years%20ago,study%20modeling%20ancient%20population%20sizes.