Humans nearly went extinct 1 million years ago, but we don’t know why

A study published in 2023 suggests that nearly 1 million years ago, humanity almost ceased to exist. This potential mass extinction event was discovered by researchers when they began analyzing the genetic data of 3,145 modern humans. The researchers suggest that the ancient population may have been reduced to roughly 1,200 humans.

Overall, the researchers believe that there could have been a bottleneck somewhere between 930,000 to 813,000 years ago, which led to a 98.7% reduction of humans on Earth. Unfortunately, narrowing down the exact cause of this bottleneck is still impossible, but it’s likely climate changes could have been at the root of the event.

Scientists suspect that when the world transitioned to the middle of the Pleistocene period, and the Earth cooled dramatically, it could have led to prolonged cold periods that killed off most humans. Combine that with droughts and widespread famine, and it would have been a recipe for a mass extinction event capable of wiping out humans.

The researchers posit that humans may have been driven into smaller, more isolated communities, where they found themselves competing with each other for survival in the increasingly dangerous and challenging environment. Sadly, fossils from this point in time are scarce, making it hard to uncover information about the event or exactly how close humans came to being extinct.

The findings also suggest that around 813,000 years ago, more hospitable climates may have been a big part of what allowed human populations to skyrocket once more. The researchers claim that as the conditions improved, humans may have branched out again, and the bottleneck may have faded.

While these findings raise a lot of interesting questions, it’s hard to verify all of the claims with the current data that’s available. Hopefully new discoveries, like those of extinct human species, will give us more information about that time period and human evolution as a whole.