> > > > New analysis suggests human ancestors nearly died out
> > > Study claims 99% of human ancestors died off 930,000 years ago.
> > >formatting link
> > >
> > > Climate, cold period related...
> > > And will happen again....
> > Probably not.
> >
> > Suzana Herculano-Houzel points out that human beings have a perfectly typical hominid ratio brain mass to body mass, but had to invent cooking to make it possible to eat enough food per day to sustain our atypically big body and brain mass. Chimps and gorillas have much the same body mass, but skimp on the brain mass.
> >
> > Presumably the 98.7% of the population that died out were incompetent cooks. We are the survivors and we went on from cooking to other technical tricks. When a species evolves a good trick, it tends to diversity and exploit the trick in a range of new environments, which is exactly what our ancestors did, spreading around the world quite rapidly.
> >
> > We are one of the rare social vertebrates, and differ from other social species by not having a lot specialist variations. When we get around to setting up a family structure that includes a range of different specialists we will probably do even better, though we may end up not looking much like current modern humans.
>
> Those cooking abilities aren't going to be much help when there's nothing to cook.
There's a lot more stuff around that is digestible after you cook it than there is stuff which is digestible raw. We evolved from fruit-eating apes, and they haven't died out - there just aren't all that many of them.