Introduction

Gizmodo report on recent research published in Science which suggests that Humankind struggled to survive during a 100,000 year period during the early Pleistocene. This conclusion was drawn using a fast infinitesimal time coalescent process (FitCoal) to project current human genetic variation backward in time, and estimate the size of populations at specific points in the past. It is estimated that the number of breeding individuals was reduced to c.1300, bringing our ancestors close to extinction