Humans almost died out million years ago: “Wonder that we made it” | Science & Planet

The study appeared yesterday in the renowned scientific journal ‘Science’. Researchers used a new model to calculate the size of human populations in the past based on the genetic material of more than 3,000 modern-day people. They came to a remarkable conclusion.

“The results showed that our human ancestors saw a severe population decline between 930,000 and 813,000 years ago, down to just 1,280 individuals reproducing. That lasted about 117,000 years and brought our human ancestors to the brink of extinction,” it reads.

“That is a very long period of time”, agrees Professor Chris Stringer of the Natural History Museum in London to the British newspaper ‘The Guardian’. “It is a miracle that we made it at all. For a population of that size, an epidemic or a volcanic eruption alone could be enough to wipe everyone out.”

The decrease coincided with major changes in the Earth’s climate. The ice ages became longer, the temperature of the surface water in seas and oceans dropped and there were possibly longer periods of drought in Africa and Eurasia. There are also hardly any fossils from this period in Africa and Eurasia.

According to Professor Giorgio Manzi, an anthropologist at the Sapienza University in Rome and the study’s principal investigator, the cause of the population decline could also be a local phenomenon. “For example, maybe our human ancestors were trapped in a place in Africa that was surrounded by desert,” he says.

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However, in such small and isolated populations, new species can arise due to existential pressure, evolutionary biology teaches. In this case, it was Homo heidelbergensis, considered to be the direct ancestor of early modern humans, Neanderthals, and Denisovans.

After the difficult period of 100,000 years, the number of human ancestors rose again. Something that may have had to do with the discovery of making fire.