“Approximately a whopping 99.98% of our forefathers almost bit the dust in what I can only describe as nature's colossal F-U,” our anonymous bounds-pushing scientists claim. Imagine that. The majority of your ancestors, nearly going poof. Makes you wonder how any of us turned out semi-decent, doesn't it? It certainly makes me reconsider that whole life thing.
Then again, a third barrel of tequila also makes me question my life choices so do with that what you will.
Their mind-boggling study appeared puff magically in the journal Science. If it wasn’t written off as the maniac rambling of mad men, it gives us the eerie idea that this climate-fuelled near-miss could’ve caused an evolutionary fork in the road. Perhaps one direction leading to the Neanderthals (bet you have a cousin that fits that bill) and the other to us nitwits – the so-called modern humans.
But alas, skeptics abound. Stephan “Scrooge” McScroogie, an infamous party-pooper (also goes by a population geneticist at the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology in Leipzig, Germany) likens it to guessing a stone's size solely from the ripples it creates once tossed into a lake. Kinda poetic, right?
Now sit with me on this thought. Imagine, our ancestors interbreeding, changing habitats, resulting in a wild concoction of genetic variations that eventually led to your depressed six-foot-two reporter, Jack Superblack. And to think I could’ve just as easily been dust in the wind, or even better, not been born at all. Gosh, a suicide note sounds cheerier.
On that note, why did the depressed writer end his tale? Because even his jokes died alone. There, your morbid joke to end a tale of near-extinction. Life, what a riot!
Based on the original article "Humanity’s Ancestors Nearly Died Out, Genetic Study Suggests".
