Submitted 1 week ago by arrow74@lemmy.zip to showerthoughts@lemmy.world
It’s equally possible that there was more than one or even a day where only people were born and no one died.
There was a low point where only about 2,000 humans were estimated to be alive. Certainly you couldn’t have had someone dying everyday then
There was a low point where only about 2,000 humans were estimated to be alive. Certainly you couldn’t have had someone dying everyday then
If an equal number or greater of people are also being born you could.
The math does several limit the possible number of births. Only about 1,000 of those people would have been female and even if we’re generous and assume 80% were of child bearing age that gives you 800 women that could have children.
That’s going to be an incredibly low birth rate and it’s very unlikely each woman would be having a child each year.
If there was at least one, it also means there was a last day prior to today where no humans died, that went unnoticed and unremarked, and probably will be the last for a long time yet.
It would be interesting to have such a statistic. Perhaps there was such a day more recently than we think.
Today’s not that day though. www.worldometers.info
The human population would have to be in the tens of thousands for that to be likely, and I’m not sure it was ever that low unless we’re arguing about technicalities regarding who counts as human during the process of evolution.
70,000 BCE humans nearly went extinct apparently. Some think less than 1300 individuals at the lowest.
Yes, humanity was very close to extinction and sub 10,000 in population at one point. We can tell from mitochondrial DNA.
We can tell from mitochondrial DNA.
Damn, what a powerhouse.
www.science.org/doi/10.1126/science.abq7487
It’s been significantly lower than 10,000 at least once in history.
There's other recent research that counters this idea. It's still uncertain. Humans have dipped low before though, just probably not levels rivals animals like the cheetah, otherwise we'd show the same genetic issues they have due to the inbreeding of the survivors.
I read the full paper and I’m not qualified to evaluate the validity of the model being proposed but I find the idea that the population was
about 1000 individuals, which persisted for about 100,000 years
rather implausible. Implausible things sometimes turn out to be true but models frequently turn out to be wrong so if I were to get, I would bet on the latter.
This is a statistic problem. It is likely to occur at least once per year with a population below 250,000.
Age is distributed and we’re only looking for one day, with a day being no well defined so we have to assume any given 24 hour period.
If it was under 10,000 there could be entire weeks without a single death.
This is based on the chance of any random person dying being 1:50,000.
This is today’s rate and in the past most people died young but the chance of it occurring does not require the population be lower than that chance of a random person dying because we’re looking for any day not a specific day.
1:50,000 implies an average lifespan of 137 years, unless I’m missing something. I think 1:15,000 is a more reasonable estimate.
Cuz we’ll be extinct by then?
Nope, just a day where there were people alive and no one died.
It’s really only possible once the population gets lower. So it could also be possible in the future too
kbal@fedia.io 1 week ago
At some point in human history there was only one human, the first one.
*for some definition of "human"
arrow74@lemmy.zip 1 week ago
So in my professional opinion I’d say no. I studied anthropology and work in Archaeology.
Evolution just isn’t simply fast enough to do that. It’s a very very slow series of changes. There would never be a point that two homo erectus would have given birth to a modern human. Eventually the populations would so much genetically we would then arbitrarily classify them as human, but it would be on a population scale.
So yeah there was never just 1 human.
Honestly this demonstrates the flaws of how we try to arbitrarily classify species.
TranquilTurbulence@lemmy.zip 1 week ago
Here we stumble again on the flawed definition of a species. It’s not black and white. Biology is a fuzzy mess with no clear borders, so am the fuzzy terms should be treated accordingly.
People love clear boundaries, but biology doesn’t work that way. Everything in biology is incredibly complex, so any rule of thumb comes with huge caveats. Fuzzy concepts like “species” or even “life” are useful—as long as you avoid the grey areas.
The moment you start exploring edge cases, all bets are off, and the warranty on all neat definitions expires. Nothing works neatly with edge cases, so those who wander into the grey area are on their own.
Coopr8@kbin.earth 1 week ago
Yes, it very much depends on the definition of Homo sapiens.
There is a strict genetic definition in which a set of defining genes constrain the species, in which case there was likely a first human, but there is every possibility that their first descendents didn't meet that definition and it took a few generations of back and forthing and natural selection for a consistent line of humans to exist.
On the other hand you could define the species based on social behavior, in which case the "first human" only arose in context of at least one other member of the species, and "Adam and Eve" or "Annie and Eve" or "Adam and Steve" scenario.
Then you go to what most agricultrually minded people think of as a "species", which is fetile interbreeding. In that case it seems like there never really was a separation between Homo sapiens and Homo erectus and Neanderthals, as there is now broadly accepted evidence of interbreeding long past the "differentiation" of the species, though social and territorial differences seem to have kept them from re-merging into a unified population.
NuXCOM_90Percent@lemmy.zip 1 week ago
I don’t think they were saying that two cave men banged and out popped Ryan Gosling.
But at some point? The very nature of incremental evolution means that “homo sapiens” was indeed born and, for however brief a moment, there was truly one single “human”.
That said, nobody will EVER be able to figure out when or where that was for obvious reasons. And it truly doesn’t matter since it would still have been raised and live the same as its parents and even its less evolved siblings and so forth.
homesweethomeMrL@lemmy.world 1 week ago
I mean, that’s just a theory.
TranquilTurbulence@lemmy.zip 1 week ago
A film theory?