Abstract
The demographic history is a foundation of human evolutionary studies. We developed the fast infinitesimal time coalescent (FitCoal) process, which allows the accurate calculation of the composite likelihood of a site frequency spectrum and provides the precise inference of demographic history. Genomic analysis showed that African populations have passed through a population super bottleneck, a small effective size of approximately 1,280 breeding individuals between 930 and 813 thousand years ago. This time interval coincides with a gap in the human fossil record in Africa and possibly marks the origin of the Homo heidelbergensis. Further modelling analysis confirmed the existence of the super bottleneck in non-African populations. Our results provide new insights into human evolution during the Mid-Pleistocene.
One-Sentence Summary A new method for demographic history inference and a human super bottleneck possibly marking the origin of H. heidelbergensis
Competing Interest Statement
The authors have declared no competing interest.
Footnotes
Two more authors were involved into this work, and we revised the abstract, the discussion. We made the new supplemental Figure 10, and a new supplemental section about Paleoanthropology.
