It is remarkable to imagine that every person alive now, or that's ever been alive, is descended from this same tiny group of beings. And all of this drama occurs in a remote spec of dust orbiting and average star of an average galaxy of 100B stars, among 100B visible galaxies. Even if we had Star Trek level tech, we'd still be approximately as insignificant.
Note that there is a big difference between "we are all descended from X individuals Y years ago" and "there was X individuals alive Y years ago"!
There were many more humans alive at all points in time than the "genetic bottlenecks" suggest. It's just that their lineage ended at some point later, and wasn't passed on to modern humans.
I don't see how it follows that there were many more humans. Math says that all people eventually become descendants of every single individual (kinda "diffusion"), or die off completely.
Say, there were not "many more", but just like 15% more. Like 1150 alive, and descendants of 1000 of them did not die off completely. Sounds plausible.
Ignoring that it might be related to stations where idk. most people can't have children (or they at lest won't survive).
The other options is that there can be while groups of humans in a distant place alive at the same time, but they didn't survive long term and didn't re-mix with the "bottleneck group" at lest not in a way detectable genetically (idk. how precises the methods in question are).
The point here isn't that a genetic bottle neck implies the presence of other humans, but that it doesn't say that there can't have been other humans, just that other humans genes didn't carry forward until today.
Agree, that's a possibility. But I don't see how it follows necessarily. I provided an example of how it might have been otherwise. I would just change "There were _many more humans_ alive" to "It's also totally possible that there were many more humans alive".
There might have been many times more people living entirely isolated populations which would have left no descendants. Which is not unlikely given the extremely low population density.
Even if all modern humans were confined to Africa if there were only 10s of thousands of them distributed across a significant part of the continent there is no way they would've had actual direct ties to each other.
Yes, but people had way more children. E.g my grand-grandparents had many kids, and counting only surviving ones is still 3x more than my grandparents. Combined with much earlier parenthood, humans were "diffusing" their genes way faster than we do before dying earlier.
Statistically, size or quantity is a major part of significance. But that's not really the sense in which 'significant' is being used here... it's being used as a synonym of 'important' or 'meaningful'. In those terms, you have to ask the question, 'significant to whom?' Significance doesn't exist outside of somebody to attach meaning to it.
Most often, the answer is 'to me, the guy making the observation.'
In that sense, that tiny speck of dust in our corner of the galaxy is very significant. At least to me.
It seems quite likely that this isn't actually fundamentally true, because the real story was a mess.
If you look at bacteria even, there's a lot of genetic transfer beyond just strict parent/child relationships either just directly or via viruses or other things I'm sure I've never heard of.
The earliest life was probably more like some kind of soup of self-replicating things, closer to a chemical reaction than biological, and then it would have been kind of a sliding scale over a long period of time before we get to anything that really looks that much like "<this> organism begat <that> organism".
The entire concept of organisms themselves are an abstraction over the truth, that kind of works for today's world, but probably less worked when things were new and interesting and messy.
Biology is an abstraction on top of chemistry (which is an abstraction on top of physics, etc.). It's all really the same thing, just a real world we're attempting to make sense out of, but we draw our little dividing lines where it helps us make sense of things a little easier.
I just mean: at some point there was a pool (or ocean, or ocean with hotspots, or a beach with chemical goo, or etc.) of stuff doing weird chemical or physical things that we would not call biology, and over a period it moved way more towards something that we _would_ call bioloy. But it was not a hard and fast cut off, where <here> is the first living thing, one cell and then it grew and replicated. It was likely a stew of goo all intermixed at various concentrations and states that what we'd call life messily transitioned out of over such a period that there _was_ really no first living thing that you could realistically point to, because life is not well defined enough for that to make sense.
Life is probably the name of the process that happens on the surface of an extremely hot iron ball covered with carbon and water as it cools.
First it starts to stink, then it gets fuzzy, then it starts to stink worse as the irregular fuzziness in the surface is replaced by geometric patterns spitting light and clouds of smoke. Eventually the surface is suddenly awash in fire and burnt black.
I'm pretty sure there is a consensus among experts that every living organism has a single ancestor "organism". Life, as far as we know, originated only once on planet Earth.
convergent evolution is a thing, even pretty common (e.g. see crap like animals)
and while very rare and unlikely different species can "merge" especially if we speak about relatively simple live form through the more complex the more problematic and limited it gets
through that isn't the relevant point I want to make
The point I want to make is that the linear tree few of evolution often presented in documentations is wrong, species diverged but also reconverged all the time. E.g. neanderthal might have died out but to some degree also mixed into what later became homo sapiens sapiens.
This might seem irrelevant for anyone not studying this topics, but it isn't as the tree one survives the other dies out view is often one of the building blocks of white supremacist race theory (which theoretically also doesn't make sense even if evolution is a clean tree as they extend concepts from inter-species relation ships to ethnic groups which average difference in DNA is too small to call them different races, but it's not like such people care about since).
Life has probably spawned abiogenically dozens of times. Lifeforms today are syncretic... they started out separately and merged into what we have now. See this with various endosymbiotes like mitochondria. There's probably also some trees of life currently on Earth that are completely separate from us hiding in plain sight (so to speak).
> a 2023 genetic analysis discerned such a human ancestor population bottleneck of a possible 100,000 to 1000 individuals "around 930,000 and 813,000 years ago [which] lasted for about 117,000 years and brought human ancestors close to extinction."
And relatedly...
> A 2005 study from Rutgers University theorized that the pre-1492 native populations of the Americas are the descendants of only 70 individuals who crossed the land bridge between Asia and North America.
> The Neolithic Y-chromosome bottleneck refers to a period around 5000 BC where the diversity in the male y-chromosome dropped precipitously, to a level equivalent to reproduction occurring with a ratio between men and women of 1:17.
Limits on written records and the limits of what we can derive from genetic analysis means 536 and other years these analyses uncover are probably best understood as local minima rather than definitively the worst.
do we have any records of how society perceived that time. It would be interesting to compare it to how that fares compared to the perceived injustices that modern society complains about.
While it's impossible to directly compare recent events, like the pandemic to the plague, it would be interesting to understand the claim of "the worst year to be alive" between a society that is hyper-distracted and always online today, with a society that walks among the ruins of a collapsing Roman empire ~1500 years ago.
That said, both scenarios seem to ignore non Western history.
In Britain, I believe only four documents were written in the 200 years following the departure of the legions in 410. (Two were by St. Patrick, and the other two elude me.)
There were likely many (e.g. maybe even 100s) times more documents written that didn't. Considering the survival rates of books (so if we entirely ignore various non-litterar documents) written in the Roman Empire during its more stable periods that wouldn't be far fetched at all.
e.g. we know that Carthage or other Phoenicians cities, Etruscans etc. were highly literate, the fact that effectively all written content from those civilizations was destroyed or lost doesn't change that much.
There was effectively a bottleneck in early medieval Europe if a given text survived until the Carolingian period or 900-1000 AD the likelihood of it surviving was reasonably high.
> What came to be called the Plague of Justinian spread rapidly, wiping out one-third to one-half of the population of the eastern Roman Empire and hastening its collapse.
Um what? The eastern Roman Empire survived for almost another millennium. Maybe the journalist confused it with the western Roman Empire (which had already collapsed)?
HN's convention of putting years on titles is definitely not intended to devalue an article—on the contrary! Historical material has always been welcome here—more here than nearly anywhere else on the internet. One of the best functions of HN is that it helps spread knowledge of history.
Knowing the year helps orient people to what they're reading. It's interesting to know when something was written, and often important for understanding it correctly. Also it provides a nice demarcation between news of the moment and older articles, which are often uncorrelated and go deeper than the mass of current stories. That's a good thing.
For myself: it's helpful to know that something isn't immediately current, and also to realise that there may be earlier discussions with interesting aspects to them to search.
Oh come on, 'hack life' & just use bottles (or whatever containers available / practical), and open up windows. It isn't hard.
Bigger issue is time spent (daily average) on getting to a water source, and how clean/safe that water is for drinking. Boiling to kill parasites etc adds more time expense.
Opening a window works for a very small livable part of the Earth. Try opening a window as Pharaoh... yeah, I'd rather have AC. And consistent heat in the winter.
Right up until you hit your first major infectious disease or crippling injury, and have to depend on the medicine of 536 to treat it, and hope the result doesn't make you die before your year is up.
Not to mention: Very easily, accidentally running afoul of some regional religious or social taboo/law in a way that seems banal to you but at the time carries some grotesque variant of the death penalty plus torture, or if you're lucky just a bit of crippling, infection-prone torture-mutilation and a fine (that you may or may not be able to pay and thus risk very literal debt slavery).
The past wasn't just another country, it was another, vastly different world in so many ways.
If I had a time machine, I think i'd rather not even touch the world of 536 (or any such distant time) with a 10-meter cattle prod unless I could visit armed with an easily concealable and robust assortment of essential modern medications, and some powerful but compact concealed carry weapons.
Worth remembering too, the plague of Justinian was one of the earlier arrivals of Yersinia Pestis, and modern humans are at best only very marginally less susceptible to dying horribly from it than they were back then. You would absolutely need antibiotics with you at least. This is not to even mention something like the smallpox that widely circulated at the time. Who alive today who isn't in their 70s still gets vaccinated against the pox?
They found a genetic bottleneck of a couple hundred individuals some hundreds of thousands of years ago so that was probably worse
There have been several bottlenecks, the worst one was pre-homosapien (~1000 individuals for 100k years): https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Population_bottleneck.
It is remarkable to imagine that every person alive now, or that's ever been alive, is descended from this same tiny group of beings. And all of this drama occurs in a remote spec of dust orbiting and average star of an average galaxy of 100B stars, among 100B visible galaxies. Even if we had Star Trek level tech, we'd still be approximately as insignificant.
Note that there is a big difference between "we are all descended from X individuals Y years ago" and "there was X individuals alive Y years ago"!
There were many more humans alive at all points in time than the "genetic bottlenecks" suggest. It's just that their lineage ended at some point later, and wasn't passed on to modern humans.
I don't see how it follows that there were many more humans. Math says that all people eventually become descendants of every single individual (kinda "diffusion"), or die off completely.
Say, there were not "many more", but just like 15% more. Like 1150 alive, and descendants of 1000 of them did not die off completely. Sounds plausible.
Ignoring that it might be related to stations where idk. most people can't have children (or they at lest won't survive).
The other options is that there can be while groups of humans in a distant place alive at the same time, but they didn't survive long term and didn't re-mix with the "bottleneck group" at lest not in a way detectable genetically (idk. how precises the methods in question are).
The point here isn't that a genetic bottle neck implies the presence of other humans, but that it doesn't say that there can't have been other humans, just that other humans genes didn't carry forward until today.
Agree, that's a possibility. But I don't see how it follows necessarily. I provided an example of how it might have been otherwise. I would just change "There were _many more humans_ alive" to "It's also totally possible that there were many more humans alive".
There might have been many times more people living entirely isolated populations which would have left no descendants. Which is not unlikely given the extremely low population density.
Might have been. Or might have not. That's my question basically, why does parent comment claim there were many more humans?
Possibly. Otoh, we‘re social animals and cutting ties with the other groups would be disadvantageous.
Even if all modern humans were confined to Africa if there were only 10s of thousands of them distributed across a significant part of the continent there is no way they would've had actual direct ties to each other.
Not everyone has children. Even more don't have any surviving grandchildren.
This is true even today, but back in the original "state of nature", death for all sorts of reasons was way more common than today.
Run that through a few thousand generations, with wars, genocides and epidemics, and you get big numbers.
Yes, but people had way more children. E.g my grand-grandparents had many kids, and counting only surviving ones is still 3x more than my grandparents. Combined with much earlier parenthood, humans were "diffusing" their genes way faster than we do before dying earlier.
The range is 100,000 to 1000 individuals. This is a factor of 100.. If you take the midpoint ,it's 50k, which is not as bad.
I think the multiplicative midpoint (i.e geometric mean) is more sensible for such a large range, which gives 10k. Still not as bad!
But what kept them hovering there for a thousand years? What besieged our ancestors until they developed something to break that siege ?
The people we descended from could be different from the entire population at that time.
A beneficial mutation followed by rapidly outcompeting other populations might look similar.
The theory is that it was like that for over 100 thousand years. Not just a thousand.
So solitary confinement into a bottle besieged by quasi equal predators unlocks superpowers ?
Why would size determine significance?
And what is significance anyway? What determines whether something is significant?
The self repair forces of the ego selecting the tale with the highest praise for me, the chosen one, living at the end of time, made in gods image.
Statistically, size or quantity is a major part of significance. But that's not really the sense in which 'significant' is being used here... it's being used as a synonym of 'important' or 'meaningful'. In those terms, you have to ask the question, 'significant to whom?' Significance doesn't exist outside of somebody to attach meaning to it.
Most often, the answer is 'to me, the guy making the observation.'
In that sense, that tiny speck of dust in our corner of the galaxy is very significant. At least to me.
Size determines significance by definition of a population bottleneck
I mean, all of non-viral life is descended from a single organism, right? I find that even more remarkable.
It seems quite likely that this isn't actually fundamentally true, because the real story was a mess.
If you look at bacteria even, there's a lot of genetic transfer beyond just strict parent/child relationships either just directly or via viruses or other things I'm sure I've never heard of.
The earliest life was probably more like some kind of soup of self-replicating things, closer to a chemical reaction than biological, and then it would have been kind of a sliding scale over a long period of time before we get to anything that really looks that much like "<this> organism begat <that> organism".
The entire concept of organisms themselves are an abstraction over the truth, that kind of works for today's world, but probably less worked when things were new and interesting and messy.
"biological" and "chemical reaction" are the same things :p
There's probably nothing special about life and it's everywhere where water is warm.
Biology is an abstraction on top of chemistry (which is an abstraction on top of physics, etc.). It's all really the same thing, just a real world we're attempting to make sense out of, but we draw our little dividing lines where it helps us make sense of things a little easier.
I just mean: at some point there was a pool (or ocean, or ocean with hotspots, or a beach with chemical goo, or etc.) of stuff doing weird chemical or physical things that we would not call biology, and over a period it moved way more towards something that we _would_ call bioloy. But it was not a hard and fast cut off, where <here> is the first living thing, one cell and then it grew and replicated. It was likely a stew of goo all intermixed at various concentrations and states that what we'd call life messily transitioned out of over such a period that there _was_ really no first living thing that you could realistically point to, because life is not well defined enough for that to make sense.
Life is probably the name of the process that happens on the surface of an extremely hot iron ball covered with carbon and water as it cools.
First it starts to stink, then it gets fuzzy, then it starts to stink worse as the irregular fuzziness in the surface is replaced by geometric patterns spitting light and clouds of smoke. Eventually the surface is suddenly awash in fire and burnt black.
We’ll see…
I'm pretty sure there is a consensus among experts that every living organism has a single ancestor "organism". Life, as far as we know, originated only once on planet Earth.
yes but also no
convergent evolution is a thing, even pretty common (e.g. see crap like animals)
and while very rare and unlikely different species can "merge" especially if we speak about relatively simple live form through the more complex the more problematic and limited it gets
through that isn't the relevant point I want to make
The point I want to make is that the linear tree few of evolution often presented in documentations is wrong, species diverged but also reconverged all the time. E.g. neanderthal might have died out but to some degree also mixed into what later became homo sapiens sapiens.
This might seem irrelevant for anyone not studying this topics, but it isn't as the tree one survives the other dies out view is often one of the building blocks of white supremacist race theory (which theoretically also doesn't make sense even if evolution is a clean tree as they extend concepts from inter-species relation ships to ethnic groups which average difference in DNA is too small to call them different races, but it's not like such people care about since).
I think that's only true assuming no other life has appeared in any other place of the universe.
Or multiples of organisms spawned in earth simultaneously.
Life has probably spawned abiogenically dozens of times. Lifeforms today are syncretic... they started out separately and merged into what we have now. See this with various endosymbiotes like mitochondria. There's probably also some trees of life currently on Earth that are completely separate from us hiding in plain sight (so to speak).
Most probably!
With same reasoning, it's not hard to think we are not alone in this universe, given the sheer scale of cosmos.
Interesting!
> a 2023 genetic analysis discerned such a human ancestor population bottleneck of a possible 100,000 to 1000 individuals "around 930,000 and 813,000 years ago [which] lasted for about 117,000 years and brought human ancestors close to extinction."
And relatedly...
> A 2005 study from Rutgers University theorized that the pre-1492 native populations of the Americas are the descendants of only 70 individuals who crossed the land bridge between Asia and North America.
> The Neolithic Y-chromosome bottleneck refers to a period around 5000 BC where the diversity in the male y-chromosome dropped precipitously, to a level equivalent to reproduction occurring with a ratio between men and women of 1:17.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Population_bottleneck#Humans
Limits on written records and the limits of what we can derive from genetic analysis means 536 and other years these analyses uncover are probably best understood as local minima rather than definitively the worst.
What makes a genetic bottleneck worse than natural disasters and disease?
The genetic bottleneck isn't the terrible thing, it's a symptom of something terrible that must have happened.
Thanks. I wasn't thinking about that.
The worst year to be alive yet.
Now that's the optimism I came for
There's always hope that we can do better...
Related. Others?
Why 536 was 'the worst year to be alive' (2018) - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34209313 - Jan 2023 (113 comments)
What Was the Single Worst Year in Human History? - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32118341 - July 2022 (1 comment)
Volcanoes, plague, famine and endless winter: Welcome to 536 - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30621640 - March 2022 (39 comments)
Skies went dark: Historians pinpoint the 'worst year' ever to be alive - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26786838 - April 2021 (117 comments)
Extreme weather events of 535–536 - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26598570 - March 2021 (86 comments)
536 was ‘the worst year to be alive’ (2018) - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23565762 - June 2020 (356 comments)
Why 536 was ‘the worst year to be alive’ - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18469891 - Nov 2018 (4 comments)
do we have any records of how society perceived that time. It would be interesting to compare it to how that fares compared to the perceived injustices that modern society complains about.
While it's impossible to directly compare recent events, like the pandemic to the plague, it would be interesting to understand the claim of "the worst year to be alive" between a society that is hyper-distracted and always online today, with a society that walks among the ruins of a collapsing Roman empire ~1500 years ago.
That said, both scenarios seem to ignore non Western history.
https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/11e63o2/what...
Update: This is a remarkable statement. "We marvel to see no shadows of our bodies at noon"
In Britain, I believe only four documents were written in the 200 years following the departure of the legions in 410. (Two were by St. Patrick, and the other two elude me.)
*that survived
There were likely many (e.g. maybe even 100s) times more documents written that didn't. Considering the survival rates of books (so if we entirely ignore various non-litterar documents) written in the Roman Empire during its more stable periods that wouldn't be far fetched at all.
e.g. we know that Carthage or other Phoenicians cities, Etruscans etc. were highly literate, the fact that effectively all written content from those civilizations was destroyed or lost doesn't change that much.
There was effectively a bottleneck in early medieval Europe if a given text survived until the Carolingian period or 900-1000 AD the likelihood of it surviving was reasonably high.
You are correct, I should have added that.
The ash cloud went from iceland to china? Where there chronicles about this in local culturesnearby ?
> What came to be called the Plague of Justinian spread rapidly, wiping out one-third to one-half of the population of the eastern Roman Empire and hastening its collapse.
Um what? The eastern Roman Empire survived for almost another millennium. Maybe the journalist confused it with the western Roman Empire (which had already collapsed)?
Its a weird comment, but the eastern empire did contract bigly after the plague
*yugely
Please change the title to "Why 536 was 'the worst year to be alive' (2018)".
We've added the year (of the article) to the title. Thanks!
I'm struggling to understand why that has improved anything.
It's just a convention on HN to put the year in parens at the end of the title when an article is more than a year old.
https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&qu...
As dang's written previously:
HN's convention of putting years on titles is definitely not intended to devalue an article—on the contrary! Historical material has always been welcome here—more here than nearly anywhere else on the internet. One of the best functions of HN is that it helps spread knowledge of history.
Knowing the year helps orient people to what they're reading. It's interesting to know when something was written, and often important for understanding it correctly. Also it provides a nice demarcation between news of the moment and older articles, which are often uncorrelated and go deeper than the mass of current stories. That's a good thing.
<https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35944257>
For myself: it's helpful to know that something isn't immediately current, and also to realise that there may be earlier discussions with interesting aspects to them to search.
That makes obvious sense. Thanks.
You're struggling to understand why someone is being pedantic on this site?
I’d take 536 over 2025 at this rate
I'd love to see the average hackernews commenter live with 536 tech for a year or two and come back
Technology? In 536 you're more than 50 years away from the invention of toilet paper. There are hardly 5 notable inventions in the entire century.
I would never willingly give up running water and air conditioning. They could make me King of the Earth in the past but I still wouldn't do it.
Oh come on, 'hack life' & just use bottles (or whatever containers available / practical), and open up windows. It isn't hard.
Bigger issue is time spent (daily average) on getting to a water source, and how clean/safe that water is for drinking. Boiling to kill parasites etc adds more time expense.
Opening a window works for a very small livable part of the Earth. Try opening a window as Pharaoh... yeah, I'd rather have AC. And consistent heat in the winter.
if we kept our brain, and knew for certain we'd be back after a year, that could be kind of fun.
Right up until you hit your first major infectious disease or crippling injury, and have to depend on the medicine of 536 to treat it, and hope the result doesn't make you die before your year is up.
Not to mention: Very easily, accidentally running afoul of some regional religious or social taboo/law in a way that seems banal to you but at the time carries some grotesque variant of the death penalty plus torture, or if you're lucky just a bit of crippling, infection-prone torture-mutilation and a fine (that you may or may not be able to pay and thus risk very literal debt slavery).
The past wasn't just another country, it was another, vastly different world in so many ways.
If I had a time machine, I think i'd rather not even touch the world of 536 (or any such distant time) with a 10-meter cattle prod unless I could visit armed with an easily concealable and robust assortment of essential modern medications, and some powerful but compact concealed carry weapons.
Worth remembering too, the plague of Justinian was one of the earlier arrivals of Yersinia Pestis, and modern humans are at best only very marginally less susceptible to dying horribly from it than they were back then. You would absolutely need antibiotics with you at least. This is not to even mention something like the smallpox that widely circulated at the time. Who alive today who isn't in their 70s still gets vaccinated against the pox?
Just wait a couple years.