Things got tight for us 900,000 years ago: when humanity was close to extinction

Eight billion people live on Earth. They populate almost every corner of the planet, exploit resources and cause countless animal and plant species to become extinct every day. “If we could have looked at our Earth 800,000 to 900,000 years ago, the picture would have been very different,” writes a Chinese-Italian research group in the journal Science. Because at that time there were only 1000 Stone Age people.

Incredible but true. According to the findings, our direct ancestors were nearly 99 percent extinct about 900,000 years ago. Back then – we are talking about a time long before the founding of the homo sapiens – only 1000 to 1300 reproductive individuals remained. For about 117,000 years, the world was virtually deserted, which the researchers say is likely due to climate changes involving ice ages, drought and cold.

This crisis of humanity coincides with the fact that virtually no African and Eurasian fossil finds are known from this period. The country was probably particularly affected by the decline Homo heidelbergensiswhich arose about 300,000 years ago alongside the homo sapiens also developed by Neanderthals and Denisovans.

How did Wangjie Hu’s team of the Chinese Academy of Sciences in Shanghai arrive at their findings?

The researchers base their calculations on the analysis of the genomes of 3,154 modern humans of various origins. Using a new, complex method for analyzing genetic variants, they determined earlier population sizes and speak of a ‘bottleneck’. From about 813,000 years ago, the human population recovered and grew rapidly.

This population growth is most likely due to the fact that humans have managed to control fire and make it useful for their purposes. In this way, our ancestors were able to ensure their survival in a hostile, cold world.

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