Human ancestors in Africa were pushed to the brink of extinction around 900,000 years ago, a study shows. The work, published in Science, suggests a drastic reduction in the population of our ancestors well before our species, Homo sapiens, emerged. The population of breeding individuals was reduced to just 1,280 and didn’t expand again for another 117,000 years.
The article has a few caveats to the idea as well, it’s not as certain as the title suggests. I’d suggest that this may hold up as well as the idea that the Toba eruption created an extinction-level bottleneck in our history. Later findings threw doubt on that initial conclusion too. We know of various other species that have definitely gone through severe genetic bottlenecks of their own, and the results are a lot clearly. The cheetah is a prime example.
