If Homosapiens survived the last mass extinction how is there almost 8 billions Humans now? Are we all related? Is every human related in some way?
In: 80
Every human IS related to some extent. That extent tends to be very, very far back. Mitochondrial Eve (the most recent common female ancestor of all humans) is estimated to have lived 150k years ago, and Y-chromosome Adam (male version of the same thing) 200-300k years ago.
Yes all the humans are very distantly related, but then so are all mammals on the planet, the last mass extinction event was the quaternary extinction event or the extinction of the megafauna. Humans are likely to have caused the event rather than survived it. https://youtu.be/Y3J9CzLW_p0
What’s the alternative? We all came to being from different independent forms of life?
Short answer. Yes.
Anthropological studies show that even a small chimp group of 50-60 in African Savannah has more genetic variation than all the human races put together. This clearly means we all are much newer species than other apes. Or alternatively, only a subset of our ancestors could eventually manage to pass on their DNA onwards.
But off topic now–
This may or may not be directly related to mass extinction per se, because even from there you might expect populations of strong genetic variation to evolve distinctly. The current geo-historic landscape of humans has more to do with a slow and systematic Exodus spanning thousands of centuries, and 5 of the 6 continents. But the origin of this massive river was in Central Africa, probably even from ONE tribe of Sapiens. That was the period when we co-existed with other “humans” of other species.
It always boggles my mind, what if we had those humans around us right now. How would the world look? Even the sapiens cannot seem to settle their own squabbles among themselves. Imagine if we had other equally or even more sentient animals around.
Now more mindfuck thing, probably edging onto science fiction — what if, there ARE indeed babies born, who are ‘technically’ speciated? Meaning that by all current definition they don’t fall under “Homo sapiens”?! We wouldn’t even know it, and we’d still be.genetically drifting to become a new human, the so called “Homo deux”
Theoretically, some of us could be as distant as 150k years – if populations were completely isolated (eg southern Africans distant from Polynesians or the people of Tierra del Fuego. BUT – there is pretty much always a constant, if very small – degree of contact. Aleutians were in contact with north-east Siberians and Alaskans; the high Arctic peoples interacted with populations to their south and each other, people from Papua met people in northern Australia and so on. Given that the second thing people do after meeting is fuck, we are all related quite closely.
Example: DNA analysis of a village in south-western Scotland showed most people to be descended from the neolithic arrivals into the area, with an admixture of Irish, Norse etc over the years. But also some DNA from remote Siberia, probably back in late medieval times. How? Nobody knows. Maybe some fur-trader picked up a concubine in Yakutia, sold her to a guy in Samarkand, who met some Rus on the Volga who…? In the same vein, an adventurer in the 16th century swapped two blondes for a small kingdom on the middle Niger. Presumably their DNA lingers yet in the Hausa country.
The Quartenary Extinction Evnet was not technically a mass extinction. Just an extinction of mostly megafauna and was likely largely caused by humans. The last mass extinction was the K-Pg event that wiped out the non-avian dinosaurs. There were no humans nor were there even apes. There are a lot of good answers here addressing the relatedness question so I won’t bother.
Get this, not only are all humans distantly related, ALL LIVING THINGS are distantly related. You share a common ancestry with all life on earth stemming from the fist single celled microorganisms to exist on our planet. We can be fairly sure of this because every living thing on earth has/uses DNA (or RNA sometimes) as a template.
Not only is every human related in some way, every living thing on the planet is related in some way. To varying degrees of distance, we’re related to chimps, gorillas, dogs, cats, mice, whales, frogs, trees, roses, tulips, coral, mushrooms, squid, plankton, yeast, and bacteria.
Every living thing has a common ancestor.
We are all connected, to each other biologically, to the earth chemically, and to the rest of the universe atomically.
All existing humans are in fact related to some extent, all of the life on this planet is, according to Darwin, related through common descent.
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