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
Yes we are all related. As for being 8 billion now, most of that growth happened in the last 60-70 years of history. Human population slowly trended upward toward 2 billion or so, as humans slowly populated the earth and advanced the technology. But population really took off when artificial fertilizer started being used en masse. Food availability shot up, and made supporting a large population possible. I’d you look at charts, you can see the population trend make a sharp move up after that point.
Well first, if you’re talking major extinction events, homo sapiens weren’t around for the last one tens of millions of years ago. We evolved from something that survived it.
How are there 8 bil of us? We really like fucking and have developed tremendous advantages over all our competition – e.g. complex communication and planning, both of which led to the development of technology which has helped our population explode in just a few thousand years.
A bit of topic, i remember the 6 people connexion theory. It says that you are connected with every human on earth through 6 people, let’s say you have a friends that has a friend that has an aunt that has a grandmother that has a friend in that white house that knows the president of the US, thus you are connected with the president. 🙂
Yes every human is related.
In fact **every living thing on the planet** is related.
If you go back far enough, you literally share a grandparent with your dog.
If you go back even further, you share a grandparent with your house plants.
You can search LUCA (the last universal common ancestor) for more info on this mind-blowing thought. It seems crazy at first, but unless life originated more than once, every living thing *must* be descended from a common ancestor way back. So yes we’re all related.
Of course we’re all related. All members of a species are related, that’s what makes them a member of a species. We all share the same ancestors in the first modern humans in East Africa; and going further back, the same Anthropitecus ancestors, etc etc, all the way back to the first life. All humans are identical over >99% of their genome; we share 98.8% of genome with chimpanzees and >60% with bananas
As far as we know, life arose only once in Earth’s history. That means that not only is every human related, but every human is related to every animal, plant, and bacterium on Earth if you go back far enough.
Humans are obviously much more closely related to each other than we are to bacteria, or even than we are to our very near relatives, chimpanzees and bonobos. In fact, some researchers have estimated you only need to go back about 5,000 – 15,000 years to reach the point where all living humans had exactly the same ancestral pool.
That is to say, if you could trace every human’s genetic tree back that far, somewhere around 10,000 years ago, they would all link up to the same group of individuals who are the ancestors of every living human today.
Keep in mind that populations who live near to each other are *much* more closely linked even than this. An absurd proportion of Europe can all trace their descent somewhere along the line to Charlemagne only 1300 years ago, for example. One study concluded, in fact, that on average people’s close friends tend to be as genetically related to them as fourth cousins!
Unless life started twice somewhere, every living thing on the planet is some kind of cousin. Duh lol
>8 billions
This is because of exponential growth in the recent past, mass extinctions before that don’t really matter at all
Here’s a chart of human population over time
https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/population
10,000 years ago, there were about 7.25 _million_ people.
2,000 years ago, there were about 230 million people
500 years ago, there were about 500 million people
200 years ago, there were about 1 billion people
100 years ago, there were about 2 billion people
50 years ago, world population hit about half what it is now.
So you can see, 8 billion is about what’s happened in the past couple hundred years, namely, the industrial revolution.
Many scientists think that roughly 50,000-100,000 years ago humanity was reduced to a population size of about 3,000-10,000 individuals due to the Mount Toba volcanic eruption. With such a small number of individuals humanity has extremely low genetic diversity (i.e. we are all very closely related to each other.)
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