Humans nearly wiped out a million years ago, Chinese study suggests
- Fewer than 1,300 breeding humans were left on the Earth for more than 100,000 years, Chinese team’s new gene study model indicates
- ‘Bottleneck’ event found by FitCoal model is ‘milestone’ in evolutionary study, co-author of paper published in latest issue of Science says
“Something must be wrong,” they thought.
Fewer than 1,300 individuals of reproductive age had been left on the Earth for a period lasting more than 100,000 years about a thousand millennia ago, the model showed.
That meant human ancestors may have been driven to the brink of extinction at some point in their evolutionary history, corresponding to an era called the “Early to Middle Pleistocene transition”.
The numbers seemed too implausible and counterintuitive, especially for an 8-billion strong species dominating almost every corner of the planet today.
How could such a tiny cluster of humans have managed to sustain the species over such a long time span?
For more than three years, Pan and evolutionary genomics researcher Li Haipeng at the Shanghai Institute of Nutrition and Health ran repeated studies to test the credibility of these figures, but accumulating evidence increasingly convinced them that the results might be tenable.