Humans Nearly Went Extinct 70,000 Years Ago

Josh Fink brings us a CNN story discussing evidence found by researchers which indicates that humans came close to extinction roughly 70,000 years ago. A similar study by Stanford scientists suggests that droughts reduced the population to as few as 2,000 humans, who were scattered in small, isolated groups. Quoting: "'This study illustrates the extraordinary power of genetics to reveal insights into some of the key events in our species' history,' said Spencer Wells, National Geographic Society explorer in residence. 'Tiny bands of early humans, forced apart by harsh environmental conditions, coming back from the brink to reunite and populate the world. Truly an epic drama, written in our DNA.'"

Comments

The way things are going

[clonan]

we will actually reach that population level again.

Environmental damage here we come!

Re:The way things are going

[shbazjinkens]

we will actually reach that population level again. Environmental damage here we come!

Hear that Kelly Kapowski? Not if I was the last man on Earth, eh?

Re:The way things are going

[Anonymous Coward]

that depends on if we allow Pauly Shore to go in

Re:The way things are going

[clonan]

The problem with global warming is three fold....

#1 it is unequally balanced..the temp changes more at the poles where the ecosystem is more sensitive to temperature. Therefore a small global change will mean dramatic changes in isolated areas.

#2 if you look through history, the average GLOBAL temperature over a one year period has typically hovered around 0 deg C for most of history. I hear that is an important temperature for something..... Anytime the temperature strays from freezing dramatic changes happen to the global environment.

#3 Consistency. So much of our modern society is based an the extremly mild conditions the earth has experienced over the last 20,000 years. Most of Europe is inhabitable ONLY because of the gulf stream and atlantic currents. Agriculture is ONLY possible because the temperature has been consistant year to year. We are in a sweet spot environmentally that is very unusual in earths history. screwing with the temperature is not going to help.

Re:The way things are going

[Reality Master 101]

we will actually reach that population level again. Environmental damage here we come!

I knew someone would say this. Alright, I'll bite. Name one plausible environmental damage scenario (other than full-out nuclear war) that would cause a significant proportion of human extinction.

The most extreme predictions of global warming will hardly slow down human population growth, much less actually reduce populations, much less threaten us with extinction. (Of course, predictions are that human population growth will naturally slow and even stop over the next 50 years, but that's another subject).

Re:The way things are going

[drakaan]

How about the people who busily insist that can't possibly be anything other than a wholly human-caused phenomenon, and that we can definitely stop it. What if we can't? Plans, anyone?

Seriously, I want my interstellar settler permit and associated vehicle already...oh, wait...we can't even go to the moon anymore.

Re:The way things are going

[timmarhy]

we tire of you because you refuse to acknowldge basic climate science and refuse to follow proper scientific methods.

1. CO2 is a very minor greenhouse gas

2. The amount of CO2 re release into the atmosphere is pathetic compared to the other gases - a mere 0.28% 3. The hottest years on record predate the industrial revolution

4. There are a number of other factors such as the above that you can't/don't give an explaination for (solar activity being one), and you simply resort to either the "your workin for big oil" or the "i'm more rightgous than you" defense, neither of which is a valid scientific defense.

Re:The way things are going

[Reality Master 101]

Good old fashion starvation and disease. For reference, see the current food prices and how these are liked in the developing world. Biofuel mania has something to do with it, but increased consumption by people and animals people eat is the major problem.

Yes, it's entirely possible to get crop failures leading to starvation. But how many deaths? 1M? 10M? Not even a small dent in human population.

The flaw in your thinking is very common -- it assumes a static world that does not adjust. If people are dying by the millions, then things will adjust. Hunger is by far a distribution problem, not a food production problem.

Re:The way things are going

[sdnick]

"How about we make a deal - if global warming turns out not to cause widespread famine and damage, I'll give you $100 for being right. If it does turn out to be a problem, you commit suicide to spare resources for those of us who saw the problem coming."

The economic impact of the kind of changes global warming devotees are demanding far exceeds $100 per devotee. At minimum, the negative impact on developing economies and the resulting harm to the poor of the world should require that you kill yourself as well if you're wrong.

Re:The way things are going

[maxume]

Just don't let him back out.

Re:The way things are going

[Reality Master 101]

Maybe something like an airborne or mosquito-borne variant of HIV?

It's certainly possible to get killer diseases, but that's not an environmental damage scenario. That can happen anytime.

Re:The way things are going

[Reality Master 101]

Volcanism. With global warming, the melting of the polar ice will result in a major redistribution of mass. The planet will want to conserve angular momentum. Something will have to give.

Huh? I suggest going to look up the mass of the earth, compared to the mass of all the water. The mass of ALL the water is proportionally tiny, much less the mass of just the ice. Then try and remember that the world goes through periodic ice ages that redistribute water mass all the time.

Re:The way things are going

[cheater512]

Well if what we are doing right now is the best we can do, and we are causing global warming, then we are completely screwed.
Might as well give up now and save a few billion dollars.

I'm of the opinion that GW is natural and we are just giving it a teeny tiny push.
Next they'll blame the next ice age on human activity as well.

Re:The way things are going

[WindBourne]

In the 60's, greenies like myself fought against pollution from companies. If we had allowed the companies to continue, we would look FAR worse than parts of china or old USSR does today (and have significantly far worse health issues, akin to china's).
The global cooling issue was a 1 time tabloid issue. It was never in the science world other than 1 article. Only idiots point to that.
In the 80's, it was reagan trying to roll back the environmental changes (interestingly, the majority of the environmental laws esp EPA was from the pubs). It was the beginning of the ozone issue.
In the 90's, it was solving the Ozone issue. And just all the other ones was a problem. Fortunately, it is being saved because the freon was stopped. But we still have a hole in the south pole, that is slowly receding.

And since the 90's, global warming has been an issue. Back in the mid 90's, the neo-cons said that the earth is not warming. Now they say that man can not be behind the warming.

Do not buy it. Just quit polluting and forcing your shit on me and mine.

Re:The way things are going

[Chris Burke]

The DDT ban was one of the most successful examples of environmental policy in our history.

I presume that you love America? And perhaps by extension that you love our national symbol, the bald eagle? Well the only reason you can see them in the wild today is because of the DDT ban. They are one of the few species to ever come back after being placed on the endangered species list, and it's directly due to environmental action. So I'd hope you'd show a little gratitude.

I've heard convincing arguments that an outright ban on DDT went too far, and allowing small-scale controlled usage would have been beneficial. However the large scale cause-and-effect of spewing tremendous amounts of DDT everywhere -> bald eagle populations dropping, and banning DDT -> bald eagle populations recovering is indisputable. We know it was the DDT; we could measure it in the corpses of their prematurely dead young.

Other than that... Global Cooling was not actually a mainstream theory. Pollution/Smog was a serious problem, ask anyone who lived in L.A. in the 80s and now compared to now thanks to their emissions regulations. The ban of CFCs has had a demonstrably positive effect on the condition of the ozone layer.

So you're basing your decision to not believe in Global Warming based on a series of things which mostly turned out to be completely true?

Good job!

Re:The way things are going

[gatzke]

The global cooling issue was a 1 time tabloid issue. It was never in the science world other than 1 article. Only idiots point to that. My middle school science text in the early 80s presented both global cooling igloo effect and global warming. I guess they were covering their bets...

I really don't think global cooling was a 1 time tabloid issue. Looking at the always reliable wikipedia, looks like more than a single 1970s article...
      http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Global_cooling

So I am a skeptic. Stick with some theory for more than a couple of decades and I will buy in.

Re:The way things are going

[icebike]

If starvation kills off 50% there is twice as much food left for the remaining 50%. Starvation is a self limiting mechanism. You have a lot more homework to do to get down to 2000 remaining individuals.

As for diseases, there is no earthly disease that kills 100% of its victims, (because such a disease would then itself become extinct).

I think you've been watching too much Science Fiction.

You are not legend.

Re:The way things are going

[dreamchaser]

I agree but I would also add that there is absolutely no proof that we are contributing significantly to the warming trend. I'm sure we have some effect, *all* lifeforms affect their environment. I'm also sure it's a good thing to cut down on pollution, but it's NOT a good thing to play chicken little when we haven't a clue about the climate long term and have very little history to compare it to.

Re:The way things are going

[ArcherB]

The DDT ban was one of the most successful examples of environmental policy in our history.

I presume that you love America? And perhaps by extension that you love our national symbol, the bald eagle? Well the only reason you can see them in the wild today is because of the DDT ban. They are one of the few species to ever come back after being placed on the endangered species list, and it's directly due to environmental action. So I'd hope you'd show a little gratitude. The worldwide DDT ban has caused the deaths of millions worldwide. Even if DDT were to make the bald eagle extinct, which is highly doubtful, the lives of millions of men, women, and children is more important to me.

Other than that... Global Cooling was not actually a mainstream theory. Pollution/Smog was a serious problem, ask anyone who lived in L.A. in the 80s and now compared to now thanks to their emissions regulations. The ban of CFCs has had a demonstrably positive effect on the condition of the ozone layer. The Global Cooling theory was actually fairly accurate. It just came at the end of a cold spell. But much like the GW theories of today, people look at a graph and see it going in a particular direction and draw a straight line in that same direction to predict the future. Today, it's called the "hockey stick" graph, because that's what it looks like.
Pollution/Smog was a problem in LA. Not so much in Raleigh NC. The problem is that people who never left LA assumed the whole country was like that made predictions based on what they saw. Many of the global cooling theories was based on this (smog blocks the sun and leads to GC). Pollution controls have helped LA. They've done nothing for Plano TX.
The Ozone layer was shown to be "growing back" even before any ban on CFC's could have an effect. Then it shrank again. Then it grew back again. It's a cycle. The problem is that we discovered it during the shrinking phase and freaked out, much like today.

So you're basing your decision to not believe in Global Warming based on a series of things which mostly turned out to be completely true? No. You have it all wrong. My decision not to freak out of global warming is due to an understanding of all the freaking out that has been done in the past when people discover something and over react, before the cyclical nature of the even is fully understood.

The climate changes... always. It is either going up or down 100% of the time. If it were going down, we'd be freaking out over global cooling and blaming pollution and smog and putting all kinds of limitations on "pollution contributing substances", like fossil fuels!

Re:The way things are going

[brunokummel]

Mother nature must have said:
"Darn it, that was close, I'll get them next time!"

Re:The way things are going

[Fulcrum of Evil]

Do you have anything to back that up? Last I checked, hunting was the major reason for the drop in bald eagle population. The DDT ban did screw Africa - they used enough of the stuff that DDT resistant skeeters are around, but not enough to kill them all.

Re:The way things are going

[Knara]

AFAIK things like ice cores can give us indirect (but very usable) evidence of temperatures for much longer time periods. Of course, with all the ice shelves/glaciers melting, that particular method might not be all that useful for much longer. However, I imagine that other geological methods can also give us indirect, usable evidence of climate over longer periods than, say, just using tree rings or the like.

Re:The way things are going

[MightyYar]

Considering ice ages last between 40,000-100,000 years, that doesn't seem too significant to predict the climate. They have ice core data that goes back over 100,000 years. I suppose it could be a coincidence that:

• The most dramatic CO2/Temperature increase in history just HAPPENS to coincide with mankind figuring out that they could burn shit from underground.
• Scientists have developed models that match this historic data quite well, and even when set to be as conservative as possible, STILL predict a warming trend based on CO2 input.

So yeah, maybe there is some input that we haven't yet discovered that explains the warming trend. Lord, that would be nice. But until some evidence of that is uncovered, I'm going to trust the nice, testable, repeatable climate models over people's thought experiments, untestable claims, and "what-ifs".

P.S. - why don't ordered and unordered lists work anymore?

Re:The way things are going

[NeutronCowboy]

They might not be optimal, but they sure are what we've optimized our agriculture for. Deviations from expected values will cost money.

Re:The way things are going

[NeutronCowboy]

Do you also ask a physicist to tell you about the black plague? You also miss the fact that changes in temperatures will also change where deserts occur. In other words, warmer temperature will not necessarily mean more arable land, and it certainly does not mean that it will be in similar places.

Re:The way things are going

[lyml]

Amusing you are mentioning the scientific method without using it. Allright I'll bite, even though slashdot groupthink seems to be global warming is a hoax.

Ponder that the gas, carbon dioxide, has light reflective properties that when amassed in the athmospere gets similar properties that of the glass in greenhouses. You don't deny the existance of greenhouses now do you?
If that is so, couldn't one set up a model of how an increase or decrease of that gas in the atmosphere would affect the temperature of the hypothetical scenario.

Indeed someone did, in the late 17:th century, Svante Arrhenius set up a model where he predicted that a doubling in the atmospheric carbon dioxide would increase average temperature by 4-6 degrees Celsius (IPCC puts this number closer to 2-4.5 degrees Celsius).

By measurement one has found todays carbon dioxide levels to be 35% higher than thoose of 1835, and the carbon in the new carbondioxide are consisting of isotopes which is consistant with the kind of isotopes it would be of if it came from the burning of fossil fuels (but not from natural sources).

So here I have the scientific method, and what do you have?
Your #1 is a downright lie, CO2 is a very potent very common greenhouse gas, a mere increase by 0.28 percentiles in the atmosphere would increase our global temperature by several degrees celsius.
#2 is a strawman, you only require a very small amount cyanide to kill you aswell, that doesn't mean cyanide is harmless.
#3/#4 are appeals to ignore the science for what feels right, nothing in thoose statements disprove global warming, even assuming their validity. Secondly, there have been no increase in solar activity, so why bring it up?

Global warming is very real and it was predicted more than a hundred years ago, yet now that it is happening, people are throwing their hands up and saying conspiracy/hoax/coincidence. Global warming is very real, and it will cost the society alot of money, wheter you beleive in it or not.

Re:The way things are going

[Planesdragon]

1. CO2 is a very minor greenhouse gas Link?

2: The amount of CO2 [we] release into the atmosphere is pathetic compared to the other gases The relevant question is "amount we add to the atmosphere that was not there before." What other gases do we dig up and throw into the environment in a larger quantity?

3: The hottest years on record predate the industrial revolution A: Link?

B: Yes. The era of planet formation was pretty hot. Your point?

C: The industrial revolution predated worldwide temperature monitoring. The "record", such as it goes, it incomplete.

4[a]. There are a number of other factors such as the above that you can't/don't give an explaination for (solar activity being one) The sun isn't providing enough additional power to the Earth to explain the observed increase in temperature. Yes, we are watching the sun.

4[b]you simply resort to either the "your workin for big oil" or the "i'm more rightgous than you" defense, neither of which is a valid scientific defense. An ad hominem attack is no more valid in a scientific political discussion than any other discussion.

I'll have to beg your forgiveness; the "global warming isn't a threat / is not our fault" line has been embraced by the same slice of the body politic that claims DDT doesn't hurt baby eagles, smoking doesn't cause cancer, and you can cut taxes forever and still pay for a war.

If when you argue on the same side of an issue as those who have long since ceded any claims to credibility to the scientific method, you get associated with their tactics until argued otherwise. "Silence implies consent", and all.

Re:The way things are going

[Planesdragon]

Is Newsweek [denisdutton.com] a tabloid? How about Time Magazine? [businessandmedia.org] How about the NY Times [newsbusters.org]? Actually, yes. All three are "town-crier" style publications, focused mostly on reporting what other people in the world say and do. None of them are a scientific journal.

The pollution from my four-banger car is not causing people in underdeveloped countries to starve to death. Over reactions from GW Doomsday predictions are. The $120 a barrel crude oil has little if anything to do with present-day reactions to Global Warming. And that's what's causing the widest and sharpest increase in the cost of food, not the redeployment of farmland to create biofuel.

And that's ignoring that the loudest reactions to Global Warming have never been ethanol, but conservation and pollution controls instead.

Re:The way things are going

[LithiumX]

I agree but I would also add that there is absolutely no proof that we are contributing significantly to the warming trend. I'm sure we have some effect, *all* lifeforms affect their environment. I'm also sure it's a good thing to cut down on pollution, but it's NOT a good thing to play chicken little when we haven't a clue about the climate long term and have very little history to compare it to.

Be careful saying that. You're likely to get yourself harassed, blacklisted, and shunned for such politically incorrect remarks.

I fully believe that the greenhouse effect is a simple matter of physics. I also believe that the effects, as we know them, do not occur rapidly. I also know that, historically, the climate is NOT stable - whoever said that it's been stable for most of history simply does not know history (Nineteen-hundred-and-froze-to-death being one example, the total environmental collapse of mesoamerica and the middle east, the sudden shift that made Europe more habitable and helped lead to the Rennaisance, etc etc etc).

In other words, yes our pollutants will have a very real effect on our climate. There is no free lunch. But, those effects belong to our children and grandchildren - what you see today is the normal cycle of change - but in a highly connected world prone to panic and fantasy, and overly willing to lay blame anywhere it can.

It may not be all bad though... it might scare us into actually controlling ourselves - before the bill actually shows up.

Re:The way things are going

[BiggerIsBetter]

Hunger is by far a distribution problem, not a food production problem.

I've read this sentiment many times, and although I agree with the latter statement, I can't agree with the former. In my view, it's not a distribution problem, it's an economic problem. We could distribute enormous amounts of food anywhere on the globe, but we don't. Why? It's too expensive. Hungry people are often poor people, and poor people can't pay enough to meet our expectations of a return (or even no loss) on labor, fuel, vehicles, storage, and other distribution resources. So, we make this choice: they're just not valuable enough to us to bear the cost of sending food (of course, aid agencies disagree and do exactly this).

Re:The way things are going

[ehrichweiss]

"The most dramatic CO2/Temperature increase in history just HAPPENS to coincide with mankind figuring out that they could burn shit from underground."

Ever wonder why the word "coincidence" often has the phrase "just happens to" associated with it? Have you ever wondered why it matches when we *started* figuring this out and were barely using it versus when we were/are at peak usage? Seeing as how volcanoes have more of a measurable and directly observable impact than anything we've ever done, I'm not really buying the whole "mankind burning oil caused this" hypothesis; one good eruption and our global temp has the potential to drop by 1/2 degree or more, yet somehow we're supposed to have some form of effect that is (not so)surprisingly not so easy to observe and/or correlate.

Re:The way things are going

[KnightNavro]

The worldwide DDT ban has caused the deaths of millions worldwide. Even if DDT were to make the bald eagle extinct, which is highly doubtful, the lives of millions of men, women, and children is more important to me.

The global outright ban was an overreaction, but we were just spraying the stuff willy nilly and it was spreading throughout the environment. The stuff is carcinogenic. In the US, where a person is more likely to die of cancer than malaria, it doesn't make sense to use it.

The Global Cooling theory was actually fairly accurate. It just came at the end of a cold spell. But much like the GW theories of today, people look at a graph and see it going in a particular direction and draw a straight line in that same direction to predict the future. Today, it's called the "hockey stick" graph, because that's what it looks like. Global cooling was never mainstream. Yes, it merited some brief consideration, but even back in 1970, most people considered global warming a more serious threat than global cooling. Predictions today are based on much more sophisticated models of global climate that consider both the cooling effects of aerosols and the warming effects of greenhouse gasses.

Pollution/Smog was a problem in LA. Not so much in Raleigh NC. The problem is that people who never left LA assumed the whole country was like that made predictions based on what they saw. Many of the global cooling theories was based on this (smog blocks the sun and leads to GC). Pollution controls have helped LA. They've done nothing for Plano TX. Actually, they have reduces carbon monoxide, respirable particulate, ground level ozone, NOx, and diesel particulate throughout the nation. Not every area had concentrations that exceeded EPA standards, but reducing the concentrations further lessens health impacts from air pollution.

The Ozone layer was shown to be "growing back" even before any ban on CFC's could have an effect. Then it shrank again. Then it grew back again. It's a cycle. The problem is that we discovered it during the shrinking phase and freaked out, much like today. Yes, the ozone layer goes through seasonal fluctuations. It's much like the CO2 concentration in that way. However, the low, high, and average concentrations each year all showed downward trends.

Re:The way things are going

[morcego]

So yeah, maybe there is some input that we haven't yet discovered that explains the warming trend. Lord, that would be nice.

Do you really think that ? I don't.

Considering human acts the main cause of global warming (or whatever other catastrophe you want) is very comforting. Why ? Because we can do something about it.

On the other hand, if humans are not the cause, we have a really big problem. Imagine it is some kind of change on the sun. How do we handle that ?

These days, I take a great deal of comfort on the idea we are destroying out planet, our "natural" disaster are due to humans doing this or that.

Re:The way things are going

[LithiumX]

Y'know, I've noticed over the years that there is a high degree of overlap between people who deny human-caused global warming and those who cannot spell.

The most common argument against any questioning of global warming is to claim that the questioner is somehow not intelligent enough to understand. It's second only to immediately accusing any questions of being paid for by Big Oil.

Disregarding GM-Hath-Come theories as preposterous isn't a wise move, but blind acceptance of what the media tells you to believe, in the absence of hard evidence (such as an impossible-to-hide global warming trend that can actually withstand scrutiny and debate), is just as foolish. There's plenty of suggestive evidence, but suggestive doesn't cut it when it comes to claims of absolutes.

The changes are suddenly coming very fast, and people want to know why - even though there's some pretty friggin scary things going on right now (such as marked increases in tectonic activity, unexplained changes in solar activity that violate 200 years of observation, and other observable items that have nothing to do with pollution).

(on a side note, while CO2 is the popular (and quite effective) greenhouse gas, it's not the one you have to worry about. Methane is far more effective at the job, and is put out in massive quantities - by agriculture.)

Re:The way things are going

[Shakrai]

History constitutes less than 2000 years. Thats the farthest back for which there are any usable records.

Uhh, dude, even if I don't mention ice cores and other geological evidence, you do realize that we have "usable records" older then 2,000 years, right?

Records survive from the Roman Kingdom -- which is over 2,500 years old. Ditto for records from the Roman Republic (2,000 - 2,500 years old). Some surviving artifacts and records from Babylon are at least as old (moreso in many cases). The Iliad is around 2,800 years old. The Torah is over 3,000 years old. The Egyptian pyramids and associated artifacts/records are even older than that. All of which have survived to the present day.

Re:The way things are going

[MightyYar]

Ever wonder why the word "coincidence" often has the phrase "just happens to" associated with it? If, like you just did, that fact was stripped of context and taken alone - then yeah, I would probably be skeptical and write it off as a coincidence.

However, along with this big temperature increase we ALSO have an entire body of scientists with models that seem to describe past events really, really well - and even have a pretty decent track record over the last 10 years. These models ALSO implicate man-released CO2 in the warming.

So now the word "coincide" and the phrase "just happens to" look less and less applicable to the situation.

Volcanoes do not spew out as much CO2 as you seem to be implying. Their climate impart predominantly seems to come from ash. If volcanoes spewed out huge amounts of CO2, then the observed CO2 in the atmosphere would spike whenever there was an eruption, and this has not been observed.

Re:The way things are going

[Troed]

"Their is no doubt that temps are going up"

Actually there is. The stations we rely on for the temperature aren't exactly placed where they should be nowadays.

Good blog on the subject - that actually bothers to _check_ the station surroundings!

http://wattsupwiththat.wordpress.com/

Re:The way things are going

[LithiumX]

Could it be, that by using fossil fuels we release more of certain elements into the atmosphere and those increased warming activities are occurring because of that utilization? Let me know if you somehow still don't get that, unless you're just in denial.

Oh, it's a distinct possibility. However, it requires two things:

* All solid models of global warming require a considerable amount of time, as the insulating effect of greenhouse gases is very small, and operate on a timescale of centuries. It's possible we were wrong, and if the temperature truly leaps, that becomes more likely.

* It also requires an actual warming trend, rather than the patchwork we see now. We see glaciers melting, as well as polar icecaps. We also see cooling trends in some of the hottest places on earth. We're seeing record high temperatures all over the world, but also record lows.

Logically, this suggests not warming, but instability. Did people think we lived in a magic time when the world we knew would remain the same forever - even though history shows that there is no "norm"? This can also be caused by human causes, and I assure you within the next hundred years that will be reality, but I'm honestly more afraid of the unusual tectonics and solar activity we started seeing at right around the same time than I am about CO2.

Also, one additional bit of info. Please feel free to verify. CO2 has increased by 31% since the start of the industrial revolution - and is projected to require far higher amounts to have any appreciable effect. Methane has a far higher GWP than CO2, meaning it's more damaging greenhouse-wise. It has increased by 150% - primarily due to agriculture (both plant growth and livestock). You don't hear much about methane because it serves no political motives to fight it.

In other words, while fossil fuels are a major factor in greenhouse gas emissions, it plays a very small role compared to the agricultural requirements of supporting 6+ billion people. That doesn't make for great news, though. In the short run, anyway. In the long run, CO2 has more lasting effects than any of the other GG's - so don't worry, Big Oil will be properly blameable for the next few centuries.

Again, please verify, then go watch An Inconvenient Truth, analyze it's logic (or lack thereof) and then go compare it to REAL ecology like Silent Spring (which has scared the living hell out of people for decades, and backed up it's assertions with verifiable evidence).

Re:The way things are going

[Anonymous Coward]

P.S. - why don't ordered and unordered lists work anymore? Global warming?

Re:The way things are going

[Anonymous Coward]

models that seem to describe past events really, really well

Name three, and point me to published papers detailing their internals.

I will guarantee certain things.

1) The models will have energy conservation imposed by hand, probably by adjusting the temperatures.

2) There will be large deviations in their predictions for some variables (tropical cyclone frequency, for example)

3) There will be crude parameterizations for important physical processes.

Anyone who believes that global climate models have any predictive value is talking moonshine. Although they are works of scientific art, it is simply false to claim that they are in any but the crudest sense physically realistic.

Have a look at "Taken By Storm", for example--co-written by a mathematical physicist--to get a layperson's sense of some of the problems. It is extremely unfortunately that climatologists didn't spend a few decades modelling much simpler systems before making strong pronouncements on the basis of their models. Computational physicists who look at GCMs all come away just a little bit queazy when they see how this particular sausage is being made.

Re:The way things are going

[Skreems]

You're talking about average temperatures for most of history, which is MAYBE 2000 years. Considering ice ages last between 40,000-100,000 years, that doesn't seem too significant to predict the climate.

*whooosh*

How do you think scientists got that information on the length of ice ages, but can't get a decent grasp on average temperature for more than 2000 years? Your sentences directly contradict each other.

Re:The way things are going

[Hal_Porter]

It is possible. Freeman Dyson wrote a paper on spraying particulates into the atmosphere. So did Edward Teller. Recently people have proposed a plan to stabilise the population in the Arctic

http://www.rollingstone.com/news/story/12343892/can_dr_evil_save_the_world/print

A real-life experiment in the Arctic was, of course, out of the question. But after some discussion, Caldeira and Wood decided to run some computer modeling to see if shooting particles into the stratosphere over the North Pole could help stabilize the region. How much sunlight, they wondered, would you have to reflect to stop the ice from melting? What effect would it have on the rest of the Earth's climate?

Scientists routinely use such computer models to test the effects of various climate-related scenarios, from rising CO2 levels to the impact of deforestation on global warming. After several weeks of running a climate simulation on Stanford's superfast computer network, Caldeira concluded that shading the sunlight directly over the polar ice cap by less than twenty-five percent would maintain the "natural" level of ice in the Arctic, even with a doubling of atmospheric CO2 levels. Push the shading up to fifty percent, and the ice grows. Even better, the restoration happens fast: Within five years, the temperature would drop by almost two degrees. 2 degrees Centigrade is a lot in global warming terms. Wikipedia says "The average global air temperature near the Earth's surface increased 0.74 ± 0.18 degrees C (1.33 ± 0.32 degrees F) during the hundred years ending in 2005".

The modeling results interested Wood. He calculated that it would take roughly 300,000 metric tons of particles each year to shade the sunlight in the Arctic by twenty-five percent -- a tiny amount, on a planetary scale. As for how to get those particles up there, Wood thinks that a half-dozen 747s could do the job. Even better, you could build a Kevlar tube fifteen miles long, with a diameter slightly larger than a garden hose. The bottom of the hose would be connected to a combustor that created the aerosols, while the top would be held in place by high-tech kites or a high-altitude airship that the Defense Department is developing. "It's nothing more than a fancy blimp," Wood says.

In Wood's view, this was a no-brainer. You could stabilize the ice, save the polar bears and demonstrate the virtues of planetary engineering for less money than it takes to feed and clothe the soldiers in Iraq for a year. Because the aerosols are launched only over the Arctic, there is little danger of directly impacting humans. And best of all, you can try it for a few years and see if it works. If something goes wrong, you can quit, and within a year or so, all the particles will have dissipated, returning the region to its "natural" state. I like this quote too.

"Human beings are like cockroaches," Wood says with typical black humor. "It's fairly easy to kill the first ten percent of the population. And if you try really hard, you might even get the next ten percent. But no matter what you do, you'll never get that last ten percent. We will find a way to survive." That's the spirit.

Re:The way things are going

[Xyrus]

"CO2 is a minor greenhouse gas"

Incorrect. Aside from water vapor, carbon dioxide has the largest radiative forcing of the green house gases in our atmosphere. The others, in order, are methane, nitrous oxide, and CFC-12. To add to this, the lifetime of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere is quite long, unlike gases sucha as methane.

"The amount of CO2 re release into the atmosphere is pathetic compared to the other gases - a mere 0.28%"

Incorrect. CO2 currently makes up over 72% of greenhouse gas emissions from anthropogenic sources.

"The hottest years on record predate the industrial revolution."

Of course they do. How could they not, given the IR started 250 years ago? If you're going to bring up the argument of "natural cycle", you're still mssing the point. At best, we are merely contributing to change that, on the whole, we haven't really prepared for.

"There are a number of other factors such as the above that you can't/don't give an explaination for (solar activity being one)"

And obviously you haven't even performed a rudimentary review of the (quite large) amount of data collected on the climate. You could start by reading the IPCC report, which summarily dismisses you claims.

As far as solar activity goes, again, you need to read more. NASA is currently collecting terabytes of solar data. If the sun so much as burps, we'd know about it. According to the IPCC report, solar activity levels have not contributed to the current climate change.

You are, of course, free to bury your head in the sand or ignore the people who have dedicated their lives to studying the climate. Frankly, I'm more inclined to listen the people who study climate than some idle slashdotter.

But to make you happy, I'll just say that all this climate crap is a worldwide group of scientists operating in collusion in a multi-national scheme to bilk world governments out of billions of dollars for their own personal profit.

Tin foil hats are available at the door.

~X~

Re:The way things are going

[Prune]

The DDT ban might have saved bald eagles, but it has killed millions of people from malaria that would have been otherwise prevented. This may seem strange to you, but some of us value human life more than bird life.

Re:The way things are going

[Endlisnis]

Global average temperature is approximately 15C, NOT ZERO! Even during ice-ages, it averages around 10C.

Re:The way things are going

[sootman]

Imagine it is some kind of change on the sun. How do we handle that?

Nuke it from orbit. It's the only way to be sure.

Re:The way things are going

[Gadget_Guy]

The Romans threw out their last king around 500 BC

Which might explain why the GP said that records from the Roman Kingdom were over 2500 years old and that after that they had the Roman Republic. You should have kept reading after you saw the phrase Roman Kingdom.

Re:The way things are going

[Swampash]

History constitutes less than 2000 years.

Hey, look everyone! We've got a postcard from IGNORANT WORLD.

Re:The way things are going

[Guppy]

History constitutes less than 2000 years. Thats the farthest back for which there are any usable records. Chinese records go back a bit further than that. While the oldest writings formally intended to serve as historiography are 2.1k years old, there are about 3k years of actually readable materials recorded by contemporaries of that time.

In addition, there are several thousand years worth of recorded events before that, but by historians living long after (although still ancient by our perspective) they supposedly occured. Many such cases can be considered the "historical" myths of their time, although in other cases historians mention the titles of prior works now unknown to us (thus indicating that these were written, rather than oral, legends).

Re:The way things are going

[Tablizer]

See there's my problem with global warming....Ask most geologists if climate change is occurring, and they will tell you that climate is never constant.

If we are changing the climate, many species may die out but many will survive. However, from a human standpoint, we may be in for a lot of headaches as people have to adjust to conditions they and their dwellings are not used to. People may have to abandon entire countries as they turn into desert. It will be very unpleasant to us, not just the animals. It will make conservation look cheap in comparison.

Re:The way things are going

[MacDork]

Nineteen-hundred-and-froze-to-death being one example, the total environmental collapse of mesoamerica and the middle east, the sudden shift that made Europe more habitable and helped lead to the Rennaisance

*SIGH* Not one event you cited was climate related!

1900? How is one year ever indicative of climate?

The collapse of the middle east and mesoamerica... Their cropland collapsed due to their irrigation practices...

The renaissance was only possible because of a population explosion that happened around the end of the medieval warm period. That happened because of a little invention call crop rotation. Human ingenuity... the warm weather was simply a bonus.

Be careful saying that. You're likely to get yourself harassed, blacklisted, and shunned for such politically incorrect remarks.

Oh noes!1 I'll be shunned by the cult of global warming. The unspeakable horror!

Re:The way things are going

[Chris Burke]

If you understood why the miner cares for the life of the canary, maybe you'd appreciate why I'm concerned about the life of the bald eagle with regard to a poison that accumulates up the food chain.

Re:The way things are going

[Reality Master 101]

Depends how you define significant, of course, but the consequences of running out of oil...

We will NEVER "run out" of oil. It doesn't work like that. It just gets more and more expensive to pull out of the ground. When cheap fossil fuel gets more expensive than the alternatives, then we'll switch to the alternatives (of which there are many).

Re:The way things are going

[pclminion]

As for diseases, there is no earthly disease that kills 100% of its victims, (because such a disease would then itself become extinct).

This is not even mathematically true, much less practically true. If the population of hosts grows at least at the same rate as the spread of the pathogen, then both can continue to survive even with a 100% fatality rate.

Re:The way things are going

[dmclap]

That's an oversimplification, really. Every year, governments set aside plenty of money (as do aid organizations) to give free food to people all over the world. However, as the other person to reply said, this doesn't do us much good if the food is then immediately taken by the corrupt government, so they can feed their own troops and use the food as a means of controlling the populace.

But there's more to it than that. Even in places where there isn't unrest but hunger, we do them a disservice in the long run by dumping free food on them. After all, consider a farmer in such a country. He works hard, probably has to take out a loan for seeds and farming materials, and tries to bring his food to market. Then the USA comes in and dumps a few tons of free grain on the people. Who is going to buy the farmer's food if they can just get it for free? By feeding them, we do a lot to keep them in a cycle of poverty and dependence. I'm not saying that we shouldn't help them, but we should also make sure we aren't stifling them and making them dependent upon us. They're only going to really stop being hungry when they can support themselves, and so we're stuck in a really awkward situation where helping them too much would make them worse off in the end.

Re:The way things are going

[hairyfeet]

Let us not forget the Chinese, who had royal scholars who were very interested in astronomy and wanted to know how the stars and planets affected the world around them, and therefor kept very detailed records IIRC going back over 2800 years. And whether you believe in global warming or not, I'm sure that most of us would agree that dumping ton after ton of greenhouse gasses into our atmosphere probably isn't the smartest thing.

Funny though,IIRC the worst polluter we have for greenhouse gasses ISN'T cars and factories,as one would guess,but instead it is the methane created by the millions of cows we have bred farting their little brains out all over the planet. Apparently their natural diet makes for seriously gassy cows whose farts are almost pure methane. There has even been talk of trying to alter them genetically so as to make them not as flatulent. Too bad there isn't an easy way to capture all that methane. Talk about a quick fix to the rising costs of fuel. We could just run everything on cow farts!

Re:The way things are going

[Kentari]

As for diseases, there is no earthly disease that kills 100% of its victims, (because such a disease would then itself become extinct).

Rabies comes pretty close. Lucky for us it isn't very contagious (not through air/aerosols) and there are vaccins.

A virus can easily kill 100% of it's victims and survive because for most viruses the victims are not the carriers. For example plague is pretty good at killing humans but doesn't seem to eradicate rat populations...

Re:The way things are going

[Kjella]

As for diseases, there is no earthly disease that kills 100% of its victims, (because such a disease would then itself become extinct). HIV/AIDS that jumped from monkeys is quite fatal for humans, though it takes ten years on avergae. Rabies from dogs too, there's about six people that have survived that ever. Ebola strains from monkeys kill 90%+. There's no reason why there couldn't be a 100% deadly one, not to mention one could be engineered. The only problem for a highly lethal, highly viral agent is that it takes so long to spread it could wipe itself out, not that the host population dies out. One freshly infected foreign aid person with an extrememly contagious strain travelling through some international airports on his way home could create major havoc because it can't be contained. Or for your basic fear mongering you can replace that with a bioterrorist and an aerosol can. Do that at a major international airport and it'll be WAY out of control before the first symptoms hit.

Re:The way things are going

[YttriumOxide]

but what if that doesn't change a thing and the Earth's climate is still doing wacky anti-human changes?

What if it doesn't change a thing? Well, then we've got cleaner air, cooler tech and quieter cars. And we should start finding ways to adapt... But, what if it DOES solve the problem?

If you're going to ponder "what ifs", then at least consider both possibilities!

Timely

[Anonymous Coward]

Timely article. We're about to become nearly extinct again.

Damn those Cylons

[Dzimas]

I guess only 2,000 survivors made down to the planet's surface from the Battlestar Galactica. They should have listened to Starbuck earlier.

The concept of races

[PIPBoy3000]

This event probably ended up establishing the concept of "races", meaning small groups of geographically isolated humans ended up having a lot of genetically distinct features. As their populations grew, they seemed very foreign to each other and only in modern times those barriers to gene flow seem to be falling.

I look forward to the day when people stop saying "I'm X race" and instead say "I carry the genetic markers for A, B, and C." Well, perhaps it's unlikely, but an ex-biologist can dream, can't he?

Re:The concept of races

[Kelz]

Or perhaps instead of saying "I'm X race" just say "This is my speciality and these are my accomplishments!" Once you get to a certain average prosperity level worldwide, it eventually stops mattering.

Re:The concept of races

[Digi-John]

Speaking as an American, as long as dumbasses think they're special because some of their ancestors came from Ireland 8 generations ago before proceeding to mix with every other background in the US, we're going to hear a lot more "I'm Irish" or worse "I'm 1/16 Cherokee, 1/2 Irish, 2/7 Italian..." crap.

Re:The concept of races

[jd]

Oh, it would have taken more than one such event, but we know that more than one such event occured. There have been other reports of other droughts nearly killing off humanity and the bottlenecks showing up in the DNA. Once humanity fragmented globally, however, mutations would have stayed reasonably local, and this also created races. (The two African tribes mentioned in the article formed from the drought mentioned and the Australian aborigines formed from early geographic isolation, making the three very special examples of humanity, but that should not lead anyone to conclude they should be treated as ouside humanity - they've a greater right to the title than most extremists.)

The rest of humanity spread out across the globe, the Genography project has some nice maps of how the genetic markers show humanity to have moved. They do make one error when it comes to Europe. Europe was settled at least twice - once by a long-headed hunter-gatherer people and then later by a rounder-headed farming people. The long-headed people are the ones who developed lactose tolerence and anyone who can digest cheese or milk in any quantity is descended from the long-heads. In order for that to make sense, the long-heads must have migrated with cattle or goats, much as many nomadic tribes do today. The Iron age "Ice Man" (central Europeans give them such boring names - at least Britain's bogman was called Pete Marsh) was, if I remember the description correctly, one of the round-headed people. He was also left-handed, but that probably doesn't signify anything of interest. He was either a trader or a trapper and there can't have been many tools in either trade that were designed with a specific hand in mind.

Re:The concept of races

[thomasw_lrd]

Now that's the best concept I've ever heard on slashdot. Makes the internet really nice. Nobody knows what race you are, or education, or even sex. And none of it really matters in the end.

Re:The concept of races

[flyingsquid]

I'm not entirely sure that I buy the reasoning behind their claims. OK, let's assume that they're right that all modern humans descend from a very small population, of about 2,000 people. It does not follow that the entire global population of H. sapiens was, at some time, 2,000 people. Perhaps there were 200,000 total, but only 1% of the people developed sophisticated technologies and cultures which allowed them to expand, eventually wiping out the remaining 99%. You still have a bottleneck, but your total population never goes below 200,000. For example, if the Neanderthals are considered a subspecies of H. sapiens, then you could have had 198,000 Homo sapiens neanderthalensis, and slowly that 1% of the species which is Homo sapiens sapiens expands and wipes them out. Certain populations of the species may have gone through bottlenecks, but the species as a whole has a stable population. Did that happen? I don't know, but you'd have to address this possibility before you go around waving your arms about the species being on the brink of extinction.

Also, keep in mind that the genetic evidence is just one line of evidence, and that's it's difficult to interpret. If their conclusions are correct, then other lines of evidence should corroborate their story. In particular, if humans nearly went extinct 70,000 years ago, then shouldn't we expect to see that in the archeological evidence, with stone tools becoming less common for a period?

Re:The concept of races

[aaron_ds]

I wish I was 2/7th of anything. Sexual reproduction be damned!

Re:The concept of races

[lottameez]

I would agree with you were it not for my Scottish stubbornness.

Re:The concept of races

[jd]

You are correct to be suspicious. The other event I mentioned was much stronger - there was a definite genetic bottleneck, there was a geologically determinable drought, there was a reduction in human activity, and humans were still more-or-less in one region and thus much more likely to be affected by a drought. Numbers can be calculated directly from evidence of remains, but also by looking at what would have existed in the way of food and water, then calculating the maximum supportable population. You can do that with a single cluster.

This newer claim must be treated with caution, because it involves humans that have spread out (less likely to find remains, less likely the humans would have been affected catastrophically) and it's much harder to calculate numbers, because it's much harder to determine what would have been available to whom and what level of trade would have existed when levels of critical resources differed between human-inhabited areas.

DNA is also a dangerous thing to go by. We know there was a mitochondrial Eve, and we know a date but not whether it was the date of the event horizon (the point at which all surviving humans were descendents of Eve, within a timeframe in which differences in mtDNA would not yet be significant in the only regions we have really mapped for such purposes) or the point of singularity itself (when Eve lived). We also don't know why homogenious mtDNA occured - unless it conveyed such dramatic advantage as to be always selected (mtDNA handles energy conversion in cells), there's nothing that makes it obviously preferential, so all mtDNA lines should have survived on a completely random distribution.

Only twelve descendent lines exist in the whole of Europe and Asia. Another eight pretty much covers the rest of the planet. I say "only", but remember at least one actual catastrophic drought and this supposed one happened much later than mtDNA Eve. If a uniform, homogenous strain was preferential, we should not be getting such divergence now. It's not a simple picture.

(Also, dating an event by mutations is dangerous, since mutations can revert, not all markers mutate at the same rate, and all kinds of other factors make such calculations extremely messy. On the DNA mailing list, people often point out that the margins of error on last common ancestor calculations are so broad as to make the calculation worthless.)

It's a Douglas Adams kind of situation: even if we knew for certain, we wouldn't really know what it was we were certain about, or indeed that we were even certain about it.

Re:The concept of races

[Hatta]

Well if you're on the internet, chances are you're not black, you are literate, and are male. Though I suppose some illiterate black lady is going to post to prove me wrong now.

Re:The concept of races

[Feynman]

It's just so much easier to tell people I'm 2/7ths Swedish than to explain I'm really 299593/1048576ths.

Re:"Climate Change"...

[saskboy]

Is this the new "Godwins law"?

What will make us nearly extinct the next time will be a lack of breeding due to an overuse of the Internet in the general population.

So...the Neanderthals could have wiped us out

[dtjohnson]

Going back 70,000 years, then, there were only 2,000 of us...and...let's be honest...we were probably a skinny, not-too-bright, not-too-strong, disease-ridden, sorry-assed bunch of H. Sapiens. The Neanderthals obviously outnumbered us by many times over and could have rid the world of our kind. Thank you Neanderthals for sparing us...and we're sorry about anything we might have done to you...later.

Re:So...the Neanderthals could have wiped us out

[diablovision]

Actually the study can't support the statement that there were only 2,000 of us at that time. What it does say is that only 2,000 of us alive at that time managed to pass down their genes until today. There might have been a larger population whose genes we have lost in the intervening time (e.g. during the Bubonic plague).

The problem with these studies is that there isn't any DNA record of the humans that didn't make it. The only evidence we could hope to find of the humans that have died out is fossilized remains, which are few and far between.

Re:So...the Neanderthals could have wiped us out

[Chris Burke]

Maybe. Don't sell your species short. We're a clever, sneaky, and potentially quite vicious bunch of apes. These few remaining humans, even if they got lucky (as they almost certainly did), demonstrated that they could survive when nearly all others of their species died. Whatever their physical fitness level, they probably had what it took upstairs.

Of course what I'm really saying is that in all probability we would have struck first, catching the Neanderthals by surprise. And without any concept of a nation-state to organize them, their overall superior numbers would have mattered little.

If I was a Neanderthal, and I knew what Humans were capable of, I probably would have been pretty worried over 2,000 of em running around.

Just sayin'.

Re:So...the Neanderthals could have wiped us out

[Kenja]

And now we're an over-weight, not-too-bright, not-too-strong, disease-ridden, sorry-assed bunch of H. Sapiens.

What a difference 70,000 years makes!

Re:So...the Neanderthals could have wiped us out

[diablovision]

Because the inheritance graph of humans is a DAG flowing backward in time (thus cannot create cycles), with each individual having exactly two parents. These research results estimate the number of unique nodes of this graph at a specified point in time by essentially tracing backwards from who is alive today.

People don't "intermingle", they have children. If the children die, or all the children's children die (or all the children's children's children die, ad inifinitum), then your unique genetic code is erased (except the portion of your genetic code that you shared with other individuals who got it through a different path in the graph).

In fact, it's slightly more complicated than that because when you have children you only pass on (an essentially random) half of your genetic code. You might have the dumb luck that none of the unique mutations in your code gets passed on to your children because they never land in your children's 50%. You therefore might have had a unique mutation that cannot ever be detected in the future genetic record because by chance you passed on the "common" portion of your DNA code and not the unique mutation.

So yes, branches of this DAG can and do die off. Nothing "points" to them, so they die. In fact, this is the very mechanism by which natural selection and speciation occurs.

The arguments they use in the article are statistical and even though they account for many factors, in the end they can only work on information available from surviving DNA.

Re:So...the Neanderthals could have wiped us out

[HomoErectusDied4U]

Precisely. The journalist who wrote this article does not understand the difference between population census (gross size) & effective population size. 70,000 years ago, the scope of genetic variation of humans - who have living descendants today - was contained in approximately 2,000 individuals. It's a more sophisticated idea, but it's also a far cry from the more sensationalist 'only 2,000 people survived'. To put this idea into a modern perspective, there are over 6,500,000,000 people alive on the planet today, but our species' effective population size is only about 10,000. If human populations 70,000 years ago had the same amount of diversity as we do today, then there were about 1,300,000,000 people alive 70,000 years ago. Obviously this is an absurdly high figure; we know from historic records that there were not more than a billion people alive as recently as 1800. What it does imply, however, is that our species, over the course of the last 70,000 years, has become more genetically homogeneous. This can only be explained by gene flow & natural selection. Recent work by Greg Cochran & John Hawks has shown that adaptive evolution has been accelerating rapidly over the last 40,000 years; our comparatively low Fst value (a measure of population differences) indicates gene flow between regions has also been increasing.

Re:So...the Neanderthals could have wiped us out

[Shakrai]

Whatever their physical fitness level, they probably had what it took upstairs.

That's pretty much the only reason we have survived. Physical fitness is helpful but let's face it -- even the most fit human being in the World isn't much of a match for a saber-toothed tiger (or any number of modern day predators) without the benefit of this. It's pretty amazing when you think about it -- in spite of all the negatives (how many other animals routinely die giving birth?) associated with the human brain we still survived and clawed our way up the food chain.

And without any concept of a nation-state to organize them

Did we really have a concept of the nation-state back in the time of the Neanderthals? That example is probably more applicable to the various conflicts between sects of homo sapiens -- i.e: the conquest of the New World, Roman conquests, etc, etc.

Supervolcanic event at Lake Toba, on Sumatra

[Anonymous Coward]

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Toba_catastrophe_theory

Re:Are we SO sure?

[BobMcD]

I have a whopping 10 mod points, but would rather participate in this discussion instead, so here goes:

I think that this is actually plausible. Things to mull over that could make this an interesting topic:

1) What evidence, 70000 years later, would decisively display the difference between a flood and a drought?

2) Could the Noah story be an allegory written after the fact to describe this event, with only the details mixed up? If so, what does that tell us about this story?

3) What remnants of an Ark would one expect to find 70000, or even 5000 years after the fact? Conversely, what evidence could be shown that would decisively PROVE OR DISPROVE that the event happened? And I'm talking about scientific evidence here. Not anecdotal faith-based cruft. Not even science-based faith-based cruft, if you please...

Love these topics. Go people, go!! :P

Re:Are we SO sure?

[taniwha]

actually the whole almost dieing out thing just reeks of a total lack of intelligent design

Old News

[jr76]

Maybe it's because I pay attention to genetics and genealogy (and I thought people were geekier than I am here) but I clearly remember this news from 2006. Why is it getting recycled now, two years later?

Population bottleneck, and his name is Noah

[tepples]

I thought the minimum number of individuals to avoid massive genetic problems was much larger than 2000. That's why man lives 70 years and not 700.

one arkload

[0WaitState]

Isn't 2000 people about the capacity of Golgafrinchan Ark Ship B?

Just saying...

If by 70,000 years ago

[monoqlith]

you mean 6000 years ago, and if by a drought you mean a flood, and if by 2000 human beings, you mean one bad-ass yachtsman named Noah and his hot wife Jessica Alba, then I would be inclined to agree. Otherwise I'm afraid this is just another godless article passed off as 'science' by Lucifer-worshipping scientists and their ilk over at CNN.

Conversation with government clerk....

[Anonymous Coward]

Conversation with government clerk filling out official forms...

Clerk: Full name please?
Me: Allen Dale Douglas
Clerk: Date of Birth?
Me: June 12th, 1981
Clerk: Place of birth?
Me: In a hospital.
Clerk: Which city and state, Einstein?
Me: Oh, Dallas TX, Presbyterian Hospital
Clerk: Sex?
Me: Sometimes.
Clerk: (rolls eyes ) Sex?
Me: Male.
Clerk: Race?
Me: Human.
Clerk: No, I mean what ethnicity are you?
Me: Texan.
Clerk: (rolls eyes again, tosses pencil up into the air and walks away)

Re:Old News

[gEvil (beta)]

Maybe it's because I pay attention to genetics and genealogy (and I thought people were geekier than I am here) but I clearly remember this news from 2006. Why is it getting recycled now, two years later?

The end of this article seems to cover that. Basically, this is a completely independent set of data (taken from the Genographic Project) that further confirms a theory that's been kicking around for a while.

Seems a bit shaky to me

[NewsWatcher]

This whole article seems to rest on the premise that humans left Africa en masse about 60,000 years ago. This is likely, but still a hotly contested theory. A rival theory contends that modern humans (Homo sapiens sapiens) originated about the same time from Homo erectus, whose bones have been found in Asia and Africa (the multiregional theory).

It stands to reason that the tests on mitochondrial DNA of a group in Africa is only useful if you assume everyone left Africa sometime after 60,000 years ago.

Given there are numerous sites in Australia that claim to have artefacts stretching back at least that far (and possibly 176,000 years ago) it is very likely there were pockets of humans in other parts of the world much earlier than 60,000 years.

This research actually only shows that there is evidence of a population crash in Africa. Not that homo sapiens across the world had a population crash.

Re:Seems a bit shaky to me

[oolleq]

The research doesn't even show evidence of a population crash. What this story is doing is attempting to resurrect the Toba eruption myth of a few years ago. There was a supervolcano eruption at Toba, Indonesia, about 75 to 77 thousand years ago and Stanley Ambrose got Henry Harpending to publicly mutter that it was vaguely possible that there had been a population crash at that time, at which point the BBC immediately did a special on the Toba eruption and the near extinction of humanity. Harpending had had the chance to do the math by that time and found that there was no genetic evidence of a bottleneck, rather that there was geographic isolation of genetically homogeneous groups for a time.

He told that to the BBC.

Guess which version of the story they ran.

Re:Are we SO sure?

[arminw]

...Could it have been a cataclysmic flood and not a drought?...

The same book where we may read about the (almost) extinction of humanity by water, informs us that the next time God will use fire!

2Peter 3:6 ..through which the world that then was, being flooded by water, perished. 7 But the present heavens and the earth being kept in store by the same word, are being kept for fire until the day of judgment and destruction of ungodly men.

According to that book, Universe was stretched out (Big Bang) at the Beginning

Isaiah 45:12 I have made the earth, and created man on it; I with My hands have stretched out the heavens; and all their host have I commanded.

Isaiah 48:13 My hand also has laid the foundation of the earth, and My right hand has stretched out the heavens. I called; they stood up together.

And it will end up in "The Big Crunch" that follows "The Big Bang" that began it.

Isaiah 34:4 And all the host of the heavens shall be dissolved, and the heavens shall be rolled like a scroll; and all their host shall droop, as a leaf falls off from the vine, and as the falling from the fig tree.

2Peter 3:10 But the Day of the Lord will come like a thief. On that day the heavens will disappear with a roaring sound, the elements will be destroyed by fire, and the earth and everything done on it will be burnt.

Revelation 6:14 And the heaven departed like a scroll when it is rolled together. And every mountain and island were moved out of their places.

Now you don't HAVE to believe the things written in the Bible, but what if the above and everything else therein is true after all? Something to think about.

Re:The flood!

[QuantumG]

Floods typically do follow droughts.. so I wouldn't be surprised if an oral tradition was formed around how the global flood (which is a legend in most every culture) was passed on for 70,000 years or so.

it all sounds like a lame plot from a porno

[EmbeddedJanitor]

2000 person orgy to save the species.

Re:it all sounds like a lame plot from a porno

[Jason Levine]

Forget the soundtrack, I'll deliver the pizzas! ;-)

Re:it all sounds like a lame plot from a porno

[ozmanjusri]

You'll be fertilizer.

(One way or another.)

Re:it all sounds like a lame plot from a porno

[Tablizer]

2000 person orgy to save the species.

Christian porno: "Adam & Eve Sweatily Multiply and Replenish Thy Earth."

Re:it all sounds like a lame plot from a porno

[Foobar of Borg]

2000 person orgy to save the species

I find your ideas intriguing, and would like to subscribe to your newsletter.

Re:it all sounds like a lame plot from a porno

[Anonymous Coward]

Christian porno: "Adam & Eve Sweatily Multiply and Replenish Thy Earth." "Gimme back that rib! You put it where?"

Re:it all sounds like a lame plot from a porno

[ncc74656]

2000 person orgy to save the species.

General "Buck" Turgidson: Doctor, you mentioned the ratio of ten women to each man. Now, wouldn't that necessitate the abandonment of the so-called monogamous sexual relationship, I mean, as far as men were concerned?

Dr. Strangelove: Regrettably, yes. But it is, you know, a sacrifice required for the future of the human race. I hasten to add that since each man will be required to do prodigious... service along these lines, the women will have to be selected for their sexual characteristics which will have to be of a highly stimulating nature.

Ambassador de Sadesky: I must confess, you have an astonishingly good idea there, Doctor.

Re:it all sounds like a lame plot from a porno

[kurzweilfreak]

Soundtrack is done. Bow chicka wow wow!

Re:it all sounds like a lame plot from a porno

[mweather]

With our luck, we'd end up with CO and O.

That's definitely a problem I have

[Sycraft-fu]

This idea that we can prevent it, and then everything will be fine. Well there's two big problems with that:

1) What if even though we are the source, we can't stop it? What if it turns out there's just no way now to turn things around, we are too far down the road? What then?

2) Assuming historical extrapolations are right, the world has been much hotter and colder than it is now. Thus it is likely that will happen again. Thus no matter what we do, we are probably in for a big temperature change at some point.

So then if we assume it is true that a temperature shift of a few degrees will really screw us over, then we need to be preparing for it and figuring out how to deal with it. It really seems like a case of not if but when. Even if we are the cause and have the power to prevent this current change, a change that we can't will happen at some point. Also, just because we are the cause, doesn't mean we can prevent it.

Either way, the most sensible thing would seem to be to figure out what we need to do to be able to survive a temperature shift, not concern ourselves with what the cause is because unless we are extremely incorrect about past temperature, it is not a static function over any time period, and thus is not likely to remain so, regardless of what we do or don't do.

It bothers me

[mosb1000]

It bothers me that people keep talking about the hypothetical effects of global warming without any real data. CO2 levels have risen by 30%, and surface temperature have not shown enough of a trend that we can really say the temperature is even rising. Sure, there's less sea-ice than there was 30 years ago, but ocen levels have not risen.

Where's the beef? Why are people saying that we're going to see cataclysmic changes in our environment, when no appreciable changes have occured so far. What is the basis for all these predictions?

Re:It bothers me

[NeutronCowboy]

Urm? This is a new one. See pretty pictures here: http://data.giss.nasa.gov/gistemp/graphs/. You also missed the time frame on the extreme predictions - about 50 to 100 years out. So far, what little predictions have been made have turned out to be too conservative.

Re:It bothers me

[mosb1000]

The problem is that the temperature change over the last 100 years has been so small, you can't really say that it's unusual. It also does not correlate well to CO2 concentration. Sea-level rises have been negligible.

"(over population is so much more of a threat)"

It is impossible to go extinct due to overpopulation. It is the secondary effects of overpopulation (such as global warming) that cause problems.

Re:It bothers me

[MetalPhalanx]

I'm giving up modding to point this out, but perhaps you might want to consider that many systems in nature tend to be a kind of check-and-balance. There are effects in the system which dampen the issue, things which remove carbon from the air and bind it. If we continue to increase the CO2 levels, we will overwhelm those checks and then all hell will break loose.*

The other thing I'd like to mention is that there really are more things to consider than just CO2 levels in terms of global warming. I don't think that human carbon dioxide emissions will be the end of us, but it could trigger the chain of events that leaves our planet much less hospitable to us. Have you heard of the methane hydrates in the cold sea bed?** It's possible that a small shift caused by our increasing carbon dioxide emissions - even if they have to increase by another 30% or maybe more - will push the temperature over a critical threshold and trigger a cascade which will again cause all hell to break loose.

So in a way, you are right. Except in climates which are around a sensitive temperature (e.g. Those areas where the temperature hovers near 0 degrees C) there is very little change right now. That could be that CO2 emissions are having a very minimal effect on the temperature, or more likely IMO, that's just that we haven't quite overwhelmed the checks that are in place. /rant

* (IANA Environmental Scientist, so there may be a margin of error in the direness of my predictions)
** http://dsc.discovery.com/news/2008/02/26/methane-global-warming.html

Re:It bothers me

[Shakrai]

Though I personally believe we'll still end ourselves before nature does (over population is so much more of a threat)

How would overpopulation end us? Even if you aren't optimistic enough to assume that technology will provide a solution (it always has in the past -- think you could support modern day population density with the agricultural technology of ancient Rome? Hint: You couldn't), how will overpopulation end the human race?

The absolute worst case scenario that I could envision is a global war for resources that the poorer/less-well-armed nations would lose. Even in that scenario I don't see the end of the human race -- it's unlikely that even a global nuclear exchange would end the human race, though it would certainly set us back a few centuries.

Re:It bothers me

[mosb1000]

What I'm saying is: if we're already half way there, where are the effects we should be seeing today? Where are the droughts and famines and floods that everyone is talking about? Is there some reason to believe that there's a threshold value, and once we cross it the problems will begin. It seems to me that if the CO2 if trapping heat, we should see the temperature rise with CO2. That would mean that we can expect another 1/2 degree rise at the most in the next 50 years.

Re:It bothers me

[ppanon]

It bothers me that people keep talking about the hypothetical effects of global warming without any real data. CO2 levels have risen by 30%, and surface temperature have not shown enough of a trend that we can really say the temperature is even rising. Um, remember phase changes, heat of liquefaction and heat of vapourization? What is happening to glaciers and arctic ice again? Are the specific heats of water and ice relatively high or low compared to most materials?

If you put some cold water with some ice cubes in a glass, how fast does the temperature of the water change while the ice is melting? How fast does the temperature change after all the ice is melted?

Re:It bothers me

[Xyrus]

You're not seeing ocean level rise because most of the ice is still land-locked. Even worst case scenarios only have ocean levels rising catastrophically over the course of centuries. The ice at the north pole has almost no impact on ocean levels as it's already in the ocean.

The biggest short term impact of northern cap melting away is albedo. The caps radiate away a far amount of energy because of the snow and ice. Less snow and ice, means more darker surfaces which means more energy is retained. This becomes a feedback loop that rapidly (relatively speaking) ends up warming the northern hemisphere.

You're writing like you don't understand how significant even small changes in global temperatures can have large impacts. Do yourself a favor and read the IPCC reports. Better yet, go enroll yourself in a university and major in climatology. Then you will understand exactly how much energy a 1 degree rise in temperature world-wide can have, and why it should be a concern.

And stop confusing climatology with meteorology. The climate doesn't shift over the course of a week. The changes people are concerned about will be happening over the coming decades and centuries. We only have a hope of preparing for it if we start early.

~X~

Re:It bothers me

[verayh]

What I'm saying is: if we're already half way there, where are the effects we should be seeing today? Where are the droughts and famines and floods that everyone is talking about? Is there some reason to believe that there's a threshold value, and once we cross it the problems will begin. It seems to me that if the CO2 if trapping heat, we should see the temperature rise with CO2. That would mean that we can expect another 1/2 degree rise at the most in the next 50 years. Droughts: You ask any Australian, and particularly, Melbournians, if they've had any drought!

Famine: Well, there's a lot of Africans who still don't get enough to eat.

Floods: Might as well include storms, so think about the number of hurricanes in the last couple of years, and many people in Europe have been experiencing SOME flooding.

Rising water: that's a really slow effect. Mind you, eroding shore lines are a sure sign of this phenomena.

Just because you don't see it happen instanteously doesn't mean its not happening.

AND you should be GLAD its not happening instanteously!

Re:It bothers me

[geminidomino]

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Internet_Assigned_Numbers_Authority

Re:It bothers me

[MetalPhalanx]

I Am Not A ________

70,000 is co-incidental with another event...

[puppetman]

the explosion of the Toba volcano, in Indonesia, that was believed to take humans to the brink of extinction:

Across the world the last eruption of a super volcano was the Toba volcano in Indonesia. This erupted around 75,000 years ago spewing out tremendous quantities of rock and ash and is thought to have reduced global temperatures by up to 21 degrees centigrade.

Re:Are we SO sure?

[ichbineinneuben]

Answers: 1 - Geologic evidence. 2 - No. It tells us that the story's survival in ANY form after 65000 years of oral transmission defies probability? But we already knew that. 3 - None.

Where can I get more information about this?

[CrazyJim1]

I want to learn more than just a short article. Anyone know where I can read the scientific papers on this?

Does intelligence have survival value?

[Beryllium Sphere(tm)]

The most intelligent land animal almost went extinct, the second most intelligent land animal is an endangered species now, and a lot of the great apes are in trouble. Dolphins are doing OK, whales would be fine except for us, but neither is likely to develop technology.

Are we going to find life on other planets but discover that high intelligence is rare?

Re:Are we SO sure?

[modmans2ndcoming]

Actually, there was a global flood 12000 years ago. The Laurentide Ice Sheet broke away and in the course of a few days the oceans rose over 100 feet.

Islands the size of those found in Indonesia disappeared in the Atlantic (the hoping points likely used by Clovis man to come to the Americas from Europe.) Entire groups of Flora and Fauna that lived on those Islands were wiped out as were any Human civilizations, unlikely to be found again due to their dept and location. The old coastal regions of the continents that were populated were wiped out as well. No wonder we have flood stories from all over the globe that are very similar.

There was a flood, but did God do it? no.

CNN article is a complete mischaracterization

[raaum]

And I have to wonder if the author even read the original peer-reviewed article - which can be found at:

http://www.ajhg.org/AJHG/abstract/S0002-9297(08)00255-3

The actual study contrasts two complex hypotheses on early human populations in Africa. The major points are:

1. (Presented as the current consensus). Early humans lived in a one population in eastern or southern Africa. Around 90,000 years ago, this population splits. One of the daughter groups is the primary source of the Khoisan (a South African ethnic group with many "early" maternal lineages). The other is the source of the out-of-Africa migration 60-70,000 years ago. After the out-of-Africans leave, there is renewed migration between the two African groups.

2. (The new hypothesis proposed in this paper). Early humans split into two largely separate African groups starting around 150,000 years ago. Again, one of these is the primary source of the Khoisan and the other is the source of the out-of-Africans. Again, there is renewed migration between these groups after the out-of-Africans leave. (Also, this second hypothesis requires some limited migration from the Khoisan ancestors to the other group around 90,000 years ago to make the patterning of genetic variation work out).

The data which these hypotheses are trying to account for - in part - is that there is significantly more diversity in maternal lineages in Africa than out. In fact, all of the maternal lineages outside of Africa are a subset of *one* of the African lineages. So any explanation of this has to somehow derive a non-diverse population (the rest of the world) from a very diverse source population (Africans). Both of these hypotheses try to do this in fundamentally the same way (population splits in Africa), but the new paper argues that in order for the pattern to be as it is, a longer time of separation of populations in Africa is required.

There are no new population size estimates in the paper whatsoever. There is no discussion (other than an off-hand mention or two) of population sizes in the paper.

The CNN/Associated Press article is sensationalistic at best and misleading at worst.

And as an aside, whatever the "separate study by researchers at Stanford University" is - I couldn't figure out which one it was in the reference list - it is certainly about *effective* population size, which is _very_ different than census population size. For instance, the long-term effective population size of the entire human species is generally estimated to be around 10,000 *effective* individuals.

Garbage magazine

[CustomDesigned]

I used to get a very honest and insightful ecology magazine called "Garbage" edited by Patricia Poore. It did well for a year or so, then started getting angry letter campaign and boycotts because they didn't follow the party line on various issues. For instance, they actually did a life cycle analysis of disposable vs cloth diapers, and found that life cycle costs were less for cloth in areas with hydro power (New England) and plentiful water, less for disposable in arid areas (Arizona, California), and about the same everywhere else. That didn't sit well.

Re:Garbage magazine

[arminw]

...That didn't sit well...

I know that the GW alarmists are very vocal and can and often do get very vitriolic in their attacks with those who don't agree with their agenda. This especially true when facts and figures are brought to the public's attention that contradict their loudly trumpeted propaganda.

Re:Are we SO sure?

[fyoder]

actually the whole almost dieing out thing just reeks of a total lack of intelligent design

Might have been just a bit of tweaking. You go for bipedalism and bigger brain with high hopes of something great emerging, and all you get is bipedal apes with big brains shrieking at each other and throwing feces. So you wipe out all but the brightest of them hoping to push the brainy thing, and lo, complex behaviours emerge shortly after, like art, and religion, and stuff, which seems like progress until you realize that now you have bipedal, big brained apes with art and religion and state level civilizations shrieking and throwing feces at one another.

I wonder what the next tweak will be.

They don't really know what forced them apart

[CustomDesigned]

They are just guessing about "harsh environmental factors". The DNA evidence just says they split up and came back together. In fact, there is a story in Genesis about a similar scenario. Population is reduced to 8 via global catastrophe. Increases to several thousand near Tigris and Euphrates. God then changes the language into 70 different variants, and these language groups then scatter over the earth, and gradually come together again. Even if you regard the story as Myth, Myth comes from racial memory.

If you don't like Genesis, there is a Hungarian Myth that tells the story of the Huns (one of the language groups) beginning with the tower of Babel (the Genesis story above). The best telling, IMO, is The White Stag, by Kate Seredy.

Re:The flood!

[QuantumG]

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Deluge_(mythology)

You too can do basic research in just minutes!

Re:Are we SO sure?

[dbIII]

Remember that the Bible was not written in modern english and that even in modern US sports world means the USA+Canada. What we read of a worldwide flood is unlikely to mean the entire planet in Sumerian (they had the flood story) or possibly an earlier language that wasn't written.

Mt Toba explosion 70,000 years ago...

[ignavus]

Isn't this genetic bottleneck already credited to the Mt Toba explosion (Indonesia) which happened about 70,000 years ago?

The Mt Toba explosion is believed to have been so huge (vastly larger than Krakatoa) that it plunged the whole earth into a "nuclear winter"-like period (just look up "Mount Toba" or "Toba catastrophe theory" in Wikipedia).

In any event, we already knew that there was a genetic bottleneck about 70,000 years ago, as those Wikipedia articles indicate. What's the real genetics news here?

Mitochondrial DNA

[CrimsonAvenger]

This study is based on Mitochondrial DNA, which is inherited through the female line. It's less than useful for determining the actual population, since the only population detectable through this technique is women who've not failed to have daughters. Note that my grandmother's mitochondrial DNA is going to be gone from the world after this generation, since she had only one daughter (plus two sons), that daughter had only two daughters (plus four sons), and those two daughters have only sons (two, last I counted). So, 60-odd descendents still living, but as far as this test is concerned, her entire family line is gone, or never was.

Have you ever actually talked to a geologist?

[snowwrestler]

I have. I talked to a lot of them when I was getting my geology degree in college. You're right that the climate is constantly changing. You're wrong if you think that implies that humans cannot change the climate.

You're also wrong if you think that recorded human history is the only record of past climate that we can reference. There are numerous natural records of past climate that go back much further into the past. And by the way, the best estimate for an average global surface temp is actually about 14 degrees C, not 0. I have no idea where the grandparent got that number. Maybe they mistook temp anamoly for absolute temp.

Finally, it may surprise you to learn that many researchers of past and current climate do in fact hold geology degrees.

BBC News Take on it.

[TimSSG]

BBC Take on it. http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/science/nature/7358868.stm Tim S

Re:Conversation with government clerk....

[Kidbro]

Clerk: Race?

Call me naive, but is this a question that is actually asked? In what situations? For what purpose?

I'm not from the US and do not know all your local customs, but I find the idea quite absurd (bordering on offensive).

Re:Darfur

[icebike]

What ever you say, big guy.

Let me know when Darfur gets down to 2000 people.

You will still be WRONG, by, say, the rest of the known world, but just to make it easy on you, I'll confine the argument to Darfur. The area will NEVER again see a population of less than 2000 individuals.

reality beats fiction

[Tom]

The more we learn about ourselves and our planet, the more Dawkins is right: What really happened is just so much more interesting and fantastic than the fiction our ancestors put into their holy books.

This (hi-)story definitely beats the whole "flood and Noah's Ark" bullshit. Evolution is a lot more thrilling than creation. And quite frankly, being distantly related to the other animals creates a lot more emotional connection than being told "here, rule over them" by a fictional daddy-of-all.

Not to mention that even a short look into outer space beats the entire bible in amazement.

We need more science like this, and less funding for the outdated liars.

Old News

[Tisha_AH]

This has been around for several years. http://www.andaman.org/BOOK/originals/Weber-Toba/ch5_bottleneck/textr5.htm

Re:Are we SO sure?

[kabocox]

3) What remnants of an Ark would one expect to find 70000, or even 5000 years after the fact? Conversely, what evidence could be shown that would decisively PROVE OR DISPROVE that the event happened? And I'm talking about scientific evidence here. Not anecdotal faith-based cruft. Not even science-based faith-based cruft, if you please...

I thought the Noah legend was just that the Jews borrowed a preexisting actual story and adding in some morality to the story so there would be point in telling it. If I recall correctly, the current theory was that there was a guy that had a grain ship that he lived on with all his various livestock. Big flash flood/storm happened and washed them out to see. Big storm several days and when storm cleared/moved on. They were in the middle of the sea. What's the answer to where the land went? The entire earth must have flooded. O.k. the guy had a big ship so his concept of the entire earth was where he sailed his craft and who he normally traded with. Obviously, the guy made land fall traded with the natives and became local rich guy. Guy shows up with huge ship with grain/animals of course he is rich in the ancient sense. The guy lives somewhat happily ever after. The world hardly noticed that it was supposedly ended during a storm. Of course "the world" for the villages that the guy normally traded with where ended, but that was due to the damn river flooding and a storm. Oh, yeah the local survivors can blame it on the local deity being mad at them.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Deluge_(mythology)

Remember POV in these stories is everything. "The World" as the town/village and everything that you are normally exposed to has ended millions of time in our history. It s just now that alot of people are actually being exposed to the concept of the actual entire world rather than the tiny portion of it that they live on be ravaged by war or something that we now have to worry about it. We love to expand what we worry about. 200 years ago we didn't worry about gaint rocks falling from the sky killing everyone.

Whoops... that was meant for another topic

[nicodoggie]

Mods, feel free to remove it... crap all that time for nothing