{"id":67510,"date":"2024-04-23T18:39:41","date_gmt":"2024-04-23T23:39:41","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/?p=67510"},"modified":"2024-04-23T18:39:41","modified_gmt":"2024-04-23T23:39:41","slug":"humans-may-have-nearly-gone-extinct","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/?p=67510","title":{"rendered":"Humans may have nearly gone extinct."},"content":{"rendered":"
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Humans may have nearly gone extinct.<\/a><\/h3>\n<\/div>\n
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When we think of endangered animals, we generally think about elephants, tigers, and whales \u2014 but certainly not humans. Yet between 800,000 and 900,000 years ago, ancestors of\u00a0Homo sapiens<\/em>\u00a0lost 98.7% of their population, according to a 2023\u00a0study<\/a>\u00a0published in the journal\u00a0Science<\/em>. Before the population crash, as many as 135,000 early humans roamed the Earth, but according to the team of geneticists behind the study, that number plummeted to about 1,280 breeding individuals, and the population stayed that low for more than 100,000 years. (These weren\u2019t modern humans, but earlier hominins on the genetic timeline; one species that was alive at the time was\u00a0Homo erectus<\/em>, and we\u2019re still discovering new prehistoric human species.)<\/p>\n

The population decline could have been related to the wild environmental changes happening around that time: Extreme cooling of the Earth coincided with a drought in Africa, leading to fewer sources of food. Whatever the cause, it created a genetic \u201cbottleneck\u201d that researchers say nearly wiped out our prehistoric ancestors. This conclusion lines up to a period of time that left few fossils behind, but the research has yet to be replicated by other studies, and many genetic scientists\u00a0remain skeptical<\/a> of the claim.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n

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By the Numbers<\/strong><\/p>\n<\/div>\n

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    Estimated population of humans on Earth<\/p>\n

    8 billion<\/h3>\n<\/div>\n<\/li>\n
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    Age (in years) of the oldest human DNA ever discovered<\/p>\n

    400,000<\/h3>\n<\/div>\n<\/li>\n
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    Years since Homo sapiens first emerged<\/p>\n

    ~200,000<\/h3>\n<\/div>\n<\/li>\n
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    Individual prehistoric humans identified in fossils<\/p>\n

    6,000<\/h3>\n<\/div>\n<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n
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    DID YOU KNOW?<\/h6>\n<\/div>\n

    Several human species lived on Earth at the same time.<\/strong><\/p>\n

    More than\u00a020 human species\u00a0\u2014 that is, species in the genus\u00a0Homo\u00a0<\/i>\u2014 have existed in the last few million years. But evolution isn\u2019t a straight line, and multiple early humans walked the Earth at the same time. When\u00a0Homo sapiens<\/i>\u00a0(that\u2019s us) first emerged around 200,000 to\u00a0300,000 years ago, we joined\u00a0at least eight other living species, including Neanderthals, Denisovans, and even\u00a0Homo erectus…<\/i><\/p>\n

    …click on the above link to read the rest of the article…<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

    Humans may have nearly gone extinct. When we think of endangered animals, we generally think about elephants, tigers, and whales \u2014 but certainly not humans. Yet between 800,000 and 900,000 years ago, ancestors of\u00a0Homo sapiens\u00a0lost 98.7% of their population, according to a 2023\u00a0study\u00a0published in the journal\u00a0Science. Before the population crash, as many as 135,000 early […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_monsterinsights_skip_tracking":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_active":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_note":"","_monsterinsights_sitenote_category":0,"footnotes":""},"categories":[7],"tags":[287,34322,34323,1686],"class_list":["post-67510","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-survival-2","tag-extinction","tag-history-facts","tag-homo-erectus","tag-humans"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/67510","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=67510"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/67510\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":67511,"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/67510\/revisions\/67511"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=67510"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=67510"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=67510"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}