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A comment on Human ancestors nearly went extinct 900k years ago. Parent comment

Re:Human ancestors nearly went extinct 900k years ago by psychphysic on Thursday August 31, 2023 @05:37PM (#37344004)
The estimate is the estimate (1280 +/- 131).

It's be foolish of them to mask it intentionally.

Once independent estimates are made then you might synthesize an reasonable estimate.

Both the editor summary I'm science and the headline here don't place much emphasis on the precise number.

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Re:Human ancestors nearly went extinct 900k years ago by adhesive_wombat on Thursday August 31, 2023 @05:40PM (#37344032)
The actual linked article isn't the paper, and doesn't even name the paper as far I can tell, it's just given as "Hu, W. et al. Science 381, 979–984 (2023)."

This is the actual paper, which (presumably, I cannot access) is specifically about how they made the estimate: Genomic inference of a severe human bottleneck during the Early to Middle Pleistocene transition:

https://www.science.org/doi/10.1126/science.abq7487

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