Great piece, I agree with almost everything. We are indeed "cockroaches with guns".
You are just slightly off on the paleogenomics.
There was a near extinction event for us around 75Kya.
Recent research suggests it was a massive eruption of a volcano in Indonesia. The Toba eruption likely released 100 times as much SO2 as the Pinatubo event, and was the greatest natural disaster of the last 2.5 million years.
Temperatures dropped between 3.5 and nine degrees Celsius worldwide, and global rainfall decreased by 25 percent. What’s worse, computer simulations of the Toba super-eruption, found this event could have wiped out up to half the ozone in the Earth’s atmosphere.
Remember the concerns about “destroying the ozone”?
We were right to worry, recent studies suggest that if we hadn’t stopped destroying it, things would be going very badly for us right now.
The effects on the human genome. Indicate that the human population shrank down to a remnant group of no more than ten thousand. Probably living in Southern Africa.
In this crucible we "evolved". We became the "super-breeders" of the hominids. We also became inbreeding resistant.
But we are not a genetically diverse species.
The big reason we survived is that we fucked all of our cousins to death.
Based on the traces in our genome we think that there may have been 9 to 11 other intelligent hominid species like the Neanderthal, Denisovan, and Florensis. Species that don't exist anymore except as ghosts in our genome.
We survived because we subsumed every other hominid species we encountered.
We absorbed the genetic diversity of all the other hominids. There are no other hominids, because we are all the hominids.
Over 20% of the Neanderthal genome is still present in European population. Although most individuals have only about a 2.5% Neanderthal contribution.
That's how we got through that disaster as a species. That option isn't going to be available this time around.
You might like the piece I wrote on this.
