Objects

• Genomic inference of a severe human bottleneck, an article in Science published by a team of largely Chinese researchers who claimed to have “calculated the composite likelihood for present-day human genomic sequences of 3154 individuals. Results showed that human ancestors went through a severe population bottleneck with about 1280 breeding individuals between around 930,000 and 813,000 years ago. The bottleneck lasted for about 117,000 years and brought human ancestors close to extinction. This bottleneck is congruent with a substantial chronological gap in the available African and Eurasian fossil record.” What a statistic! The resilience of an embattled population of little more than a 1,000 archaic humans for more than four thousand generations is a striking testament to the matchless tenacity of our ancestors. For perspective, it was scarcely four generations between the invention of electric wire and the first quantum computer! Ultimately this paper necessitates further investigation but, if true, it is a staggering thought. It was interesting enough to earn an article in futurist magazine Gizmodo.


• The REAL Story of the Mormon Church, a fascinating, well-edited telling of the history of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints by ex-Mormon Johnny Harris. Johnny Harris has been criticized by those in historical education for sensational storytelling that lacks nuance, but I think he is in his wheelhouse with this series and does well to lengthen its presentation accordingly. It includes fascinating facts regarding the origins and historical context of the Church, including some startling statistics: in 1790, only 10% of White Americans were weekly churchgoers. For comparison, 20% of people today are, and that number peaked at 49% in the late 1950s. The story comes amid a general rebranding of the Mormon Church—since changing their logo to the Christus statue in 2020 and ditching the word ‘Mormon’ officially, they have been trying earnestly to emphasize the Christian elements of their faith. Within the last week, they have begun changing local church icons on Google Maps from the Angel Moroni to the Christian cross, though they do not even officially use the cross.

Conclusions

Time prevented us from discussing the full range of subjects that we had hoped, and we settled for two each. Jake’s August subject was on monkeys’ former inhabitation of Europe and how, driven irrecoverably south by glaciation, they no longer walk the continent. He dove deeper into the subject, researching the spread of primates from continent to continent, with fascinating results. A fantastical string of rafting events enabled their propagation, bringing into question what species could have been with greater luck. We transitioned to a discussion of my first item: the human bottleneck. We agreed that the implications for the exploration of the human genome were profound, and that there was a kind of romantic human exceptionalism about the extreme resilience of the species.

We discussed separately a Jake’s September subject was Dogor, an 18,000-year-old canine wrested from the Siberian permafrost in 2018. Its unique genetics placed it in a gray area between wolf and dog, and it provided an interesting fixture in our ongoing conversations about evolution. On my Mormon Church subject, we agreed that history tends to happen in series of larger trends—Joseph Smith having ridden the Second Great Awakening—and sought a more holistic view of the human past. We admired the transcension of conventional religion that early America had surpassed and lamented its return to dogma, questioning whether a Fifth Great Awakening would strike in our lifetimes.