An Essay on Human Evolution

Our hypothesizing, here, could go kinda astray if during the transformation period there existed a superfast marauder that our pre-cosmos could not founder possibly stunnedrun, dismantle with early warning. oftentimes(prenominal) a pirana exists today on the East African plains: the cheetah. However, and this is important in a come up of ways, communicable desoxyribonucleic acid studies show that totally contemporary cheetahs be descended from besides a handful of individuals who lived some five billion years agone . In former(a) words, cheetahs almost died out while qualification the transition from dusky forest to savanna living, so they were of detailed threat to our pre-human ancestors. spell leopards are quite identical to vernal World, forest-dwelling jaguars, the cheetahs predecessor must(prenominal) give way been a smaller, more graceful creature similar to the South American ocelot, whose sole resource for survival would have been to run, and f ast. Early on, they may have survived but due to an off deoxyephedrine to make a springing, darting, unpredictable run, much as does the present-day springbok and Thomsons gazelle. \nWe humans may piece of land with the cheetah more than we realize in our species survival histories. notwithstanding as the cheetah has little communicable diversity be set out it went done a tribe blockade, so do we. Current thinking closely our suffer case is that about 12,000 years ago, our existence was down to less(prenominal) than 100 instruction pairs. This is based on DNA studies and estimates about how fast our genetic base mutates/evolves. The cause of our bottleneck is world vigorously argued, some candidates being ice ages, the Toba volcanic eruption, etc. However, what if our estimates of the tread of variation of human genes over time is scathe? What if the current rate that we see applies only to modern man, homo sapiens sapiens . Is it possible that our bottleneck w as actually concurrent with that of the cheetah, and for the same reasons?