1 Million Years Ago, A Depopulation Event Killed 99% Of Early Humans But Resulted In Us Becoming Conscious

Where do we really come from and how is Chromosome 2 involved?

What sets humans apart from the intricate tapestry of life on Earth? Is it our ability to ponder the cosmos, to compose symphonies, to aspire to virtues or to delve into abstract ideas on Substack? The unfathomable depths of human consciousness both mystify and define us. We possess a sense of self-awareness, a grasp of past and future and an ability to manipulate complex ideas (well some of us anyway!) —traits that seem to elevate us above other sentient beings. Yet, the origins of this consciousness remains a mystery. Did it emerge slowly, through hundreds of thousands of years of incremental evolutionary changes? Or was it the result of a seismic shift, a sudden leap that catapulted us into self-awareness?

These eternal questions gain an added layer of complexity when juxtaposed against a startling new scientific discovery—a bottleneck event that nearly wiped out our ancestors approximately one million years ago. These findings suggest that humanity was once on the brink of extinction, reduced to a precarious handful of breeding individuals. It's a calamity that decimated our ancestral population, but also, intriguingly, may have catalysed our evolution into Homo sapiens.

This discovery raises another tantalising prospect: could this catastrophic bottleneck also hold the key to the birth of human consciousness? Could the event that nearly annihilated us also have forged the cognitive faculties that set us apart today?

But oh no, I won't stop there. I’ll look at ancient texts and myths trying to seek allegorical echoes of these pivotal events. Could our ancestors have tried to document their escape from the brink, their elevation to a new plane of existence, in cryptic stories and allegories? Could these tales contain kernels of truth, coded messages or ancestral memories, that point us to the circumstances of our remarkable cognitive evolution?

As it’s a Sunday I will explore the plausible, the speculative, and even the seemingly fantastical as I attempt to untangle the intricate web that links our past calamities to our present capabilities.