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- The human race was nearly wiped out as it approached a severe cooling period
- This severe “bottleneck” lasted more than 100,000 years and posed a threat to humanity
Research shows that early humans nearly went extinct 900,000 years ago, when the population of our ancestors fell to just 1,280 individuals.
A new study has found that the human race was nearly wiped out as it approached a severe cooling period in Earth’s history known as the Middle Pleistocene.
This severe “bottleneck” lasted more than 100,000 years and posed a threat to humanity as we know it today, experts say.
A team at East China Normal University developed a model that could look at modern gene lines and use them to estimate past population sizes.
They used their model to analyze the DNA of 3,154 modern humans from both African and non-African populations.
Humans became extinct nearly 900,000 years ago, when our ancestors’ population fell to just 1,280 individuals, study shows (stock image)
A team at East China Normal University developed a model that could look at modern gene lines and use them to estimate past population sizes
Their findings, published in the journal Science, suggest there were only about 1,280 breeding individuals left about 900,000 years ago, and this lasted for 117,000 years.
They estimate that nearly 99 percent of our ancestral population was lost at the onset of this bottleneck.
The decline also coincided with climate change leading to long periods of glaciation, a drop in sea surface temperatures, possible long periods of drought and the loss of other species that may have been a food source.
Our last common ancestor with the Neanderthals, and another extinct human species called the Denisovans, were also thought to have lived during this period.
Senior author Yi-Hsuan Pan said their findings “open up a new field in human evolution.”
“It raises a lot of questions, such as the places these individuals lived, how they overcame catastrophic climate changes, and whether natural selection accelerated the evolution of the human brain during the bottleneck,” she added.
Commenting on the study, British experts on human evolution, Nick Ashton and Chris Stringer, said: ‘The results suggest that our ancestors suffered a severe population bottleneck that began about 930,000 years ago and lasted nearly 120,000 years.
‘It is estimated that this has reduced the number of breeding individuals to 1300, nearly pushing our ancestors to extinction.
“The provocative study highlights the fragility of early human populations, with the implication that our evolutionary lineage was nearly wiped out.”