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Updated: Jul 17, 2025

Primer Extension Capture: Targeted Sequence Retrieval from Heavily Degraded DNA Sources
Published on: September 3, 2009
Genomic inference of a severe human bottleneck during the Early to Middle Pleistocene transition
Wangjie Hu1,2, Ziqian Hao3, Pengyuan Du1,3
1CAS Key Laboratory of Computational Biology, Shanghai Institute of Nutrition and Health, University of Chinese Academy of Sciences, Chinese Academy of Sciences, Shanghai, China.
Abstract:
Population size history is essential for studying human evolution. However, ancient population size history during the Pleistocene is notoriously difficult to unravel. In this study, we developed a fast infinitesimal time coalescent process (FitCoal) to circumvent this difficulty and calculated the composite likelihood for present-day human genomic sequences of 3154 individuals. Results showed that human ancestors went through a severe population bottleneck with about 1280 breeding individuals between around 930,000 and 813,000 years ago. The bottleneck lasted for about 117,000 years and brought human ancestors close to extinction. This bottleneck is congruent with a substantial chronological gap in the available African and Eurasian fossil record. Our results provide new insights into our ancestry and suggest a coincident speciation event.
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