[math-fun] A Star Grazed Our Solar System 70,000 Years Ago
FYI -- This incident is particularly interesting, since there was a human population "bottleneck" at approximately the same time. The "bottleneck" is supported by DNA evidence, although its exact timing is difficult to determine. However, the purported cause of this bottleneck is quite controversial. https://www.rochester.edu/newscenter/scholz-star/ https://www.space.com/40043-star-grazed-our-solar-system-disrupted-orbits.ht... A Star Grazed Our Solar System 70,000 Years Ago, and Early Humans Likely Saw It By Mike Wall, Space.com Senior Writer | March 21, 2018 11:50am ET https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Toba_catastrophe_theory "In 1993, science journalist Ann Gibbons posited that a population bottleneck occurred in human evolution about 70,000 years ago, and she suggested that this was caused by the [Toba] eruption. Biologist Michael R. Rampino of New York University and volcanologist Stephen Self of the University of Hawaii at Manoa support her suggestion. In 1998, the bottleneck theory was further developed by anthropologist Stanley H. Ambrose of the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign." https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Genetic_bottleneck "The controversial Toba catastrophe theory, presented in the late 1990s to early 2000s, suggested that a bottleneck of the human population occurred c. 70,000 years ago, proposing that the human population was reduced to perhaps 10,000Â30,000 individuals when the Toba supervolcano in Indonesia erupted and triggered a major environmental change. Parallel bottlenecks were proposed to exist among chimpanzees, gorillas, rhesus macaques, orangutans and tigers. The hypothesis was based on geological evidence of sudden climate change and on coalescence evidence of some genes (including mitochondrial DNA, Y-chromosome DNA and some nuclear genes) and the relatively low level of genetic variation in humans."
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Henry Baker