Stephan Schieffels, group leader of population genetics at Germany’s Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology, told AFP he was “extremely skeptical” that researchers could account for the statistical uncertainty involved in such analyses.
Schiefels said it would “never be possible” to use genomic analysis of modern humans to get an accurate number from that long ago, such as 1,280, emphasizing that such research typically has a wide range of estimates. Is.
Lee said their range was between 1,270 and 1,300 individuals – a difference of only 30.
Schiefels also said that the data used for the research had existed for years, and that no such near-extinction events had been observed in previous methods that used it to estimate past population sizes.
The study authors simulated the bottleneck using some of these previous models, this time observing a decline in their population.
However, since the models were supposed to pick up the bottleneck for the first time, “it’s hard to be confident in the conclusions”, said Pontus Skoglund of the UK’s Francis Crick Institute.
“There was a pretty unanimous reaction among population geneticists, people who work in this field, that the paper was unconvincing,” Alwyn Scally, a researcher in human evolutionary genetics at the University of Cambridge, told AFP.
Our ancestors may have come close to extinction at some point, but the ability of modern genomic data to predict such an event was “very weak,” he said.
“That’s probably one of those questions we won’t answer.”