When humanity was one step away from extinction

with Publishing In the journal Science, the research group reported that humanity was on the verge of extinction when the population on Earth at one point was only 1,300 people. According to this research, the critical time for humanity’s existence was set at about one million years ago. Current anthropological findings have shown that a million years ago there were different species of humans, the most famous of which is Heidelbergensis (Homo heidelbergensis).

The researchers studied the genomes of more than 3,150 modern humans from 10 African and 40 non-African groups. At the same time, they have developed a new tool with which they claim to be able to make highly accurate estimates of the population sizes of our distant ancestors by examining the diversity of genetic sequences observed in their descendants.

The study shows that between 813,000 and 930,000 years ago, there was a mass extinction of human groups on the planet, leaving only 1,300 people alive. An equally surprising, if not more interesting, result of the study is that this very small group of humans did not grow at all for about 117,000 years. This means that in some still unknown but certainly miraculous way, these few people who lived on Earth managed to survive all kinds of hardships (environmental, large carnivores of the time, diseases, etc.) for tens of thousands of years until they existed. Favorable. Suitable conditions for them to begin to reproduce.

Regarding the cause of the mass extinction, the results of the study indicate that the mass extinction of humans in that time period coincided with strong climate change, as there was initially a decrease in temperature and the appearance of glaciers, followed by long-term droughts in Africa and Eurasia. Although there are no results proving a direct relationship between the radical decline in population and the climatic conditions of that period, it is clear that the odds that these conditions were the cause of mass human extinction are very high.

Previous studies have shown that the last common ancestor of modern humans, Neanderthals and Denisovans, lived about 765,000 to 550,000 years ago, roughly the same time when there were very few humans on the planet. And this, in turn, indicates, according to experts, that the imminent extinction of humans is somehow connected with their evolution, specifically with the evolution of the last common ancestor of modern humans, Neanderthals and Denisovans.

“If this last common ancestor lived during or immediately after the human mass extinction, it may have played a role in the split of ancient human groups into modern humans, Neanderthals and Denisovans,” says Chris Stenger, a human paleontologist at the Natural History Museum. London, who was not a member of the research team.

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