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Comment by Aardwolf | Hacker News Reader

It's pretty crazy to think about this: if a generation would be 25 years on average, only 5 million individuals lived during those 100k years. But today, 100k years in the future sounds like a 100x longer time than what would already be unimaginable science fiction...

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Imagine this: watch two years of the life of every human alive today. You'll need more time than the age of the universe (as far as we know).

so we human beings just spent 1.5x of the age of the universe fighting covid-19. sad!

No, it doesn't mean that. The bottleneck doesn't say anything about how many people were alive then, just how many contributed DNA surviving until present day. There could have been millions of individuals whose offspring eventually ended up as genetic dead ends and we'd never know, except for fossils.

Would we get the same result from a few millennia of a tribal social structure where only the chief gets to impregnate the women?

The next bottleneck will not be caused by climate change challenges but by tinder and out of control hypergamy.

Good luck making that happen when human male teenagers are on average the most aggressive and unreasonable version of our species.

I meant half a million years ago when (so the narrative goes) Big Leader Ug ruled a small band of early humans by physical force and could club anyone who wanted to mate with Ug's Womans. I was wondering if a protracted period of this could produce an equivalent genetic effect to a single population choke point under the relatively modern assumption that humans pair off.

Of course that doesn't mesh with the simultaneous narrative that humans haven't significantly changed biologically since then. You get that.

> ...if a generation would be 25 years on average, only 5 million individuals lived during those 100k years.

Related: roughly 8% of people who have ever lived are still alive today [1]. And in one year we have 25x more children born than homo sapiens in those first hundreds of thousands of years (140M/yr vs. a few millions).

[1] https://www.techopian.com/eight-per-cent-of-people-who-have-...

Crazy to think about! Minor correction: 5 million reproduced, presumably more lived but died young, etc. but you point still stands

That perspective - is why we can say that we live in a very busy world right now. So much human life going on at the same time in this moment. A lot more than compared with 100k, 10k, 1k and 100 years ago.

Fair to say most of humankind’s time then has been spent staring at small digital screens.

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