Population regime· The columns of time

Scattered foragers

350 ka → 65 ka

For its first quarter of a million years, the species lived as small, scattered bands of hunter-gatherers, almost entirely within Africa.

Demographic regime of small, dispersed hunter-gatherer populations, established in Africa and, for most of the period, almost exclusively on that continent.

What the evidence shows

For most of this interval, the species is distributed in small groups on a single continent. Genetic reconstructions supply a measure of it: effective population size, that is, the number of breeders implied by the diversity observed in present-day genomes, remains between a few thousand and a few tens of thousands of individuals across these 285,000 years. That quantity is not an actual head count and is usually far smaller; what matters is the order of magnitude: over nine tenths of its history, the species constitutes a not very abundant African mammal.

Bounds and conventions

No count is possible at this chronological depth. Genetics restores only relative variations in effective size and not head counts, so that absolute values remain unknown.