Modelling the distribution of variation within and between genomes can provide insights about the history and demography of our ancestor populations14. We used the pairwise sequentially Markovian coalescent (PSMC)14 method to characterize the effective population size (Ne) of the ancestral populations (Fig. 2b and Extended Data Fig. 7). Our results show a shared demographic history for all humans beyond ∼150,000 to 200,000 years ago. Further, they show that European, Asian and American populations shared strong and sustained bottlenecks, all with Ne < 1,500, between 15,000 to 20,000 years ago. In contrast, the bottleneck experienced by African populations during the same time period appears less severe, with Ne > 4,250. These bottlenecks were followed by extremely rapid inferred population growth in non-African populations, with notable exceptions including the PEL, MXL and FIN.
