Did Our Ancestors Already Face Extinction Once?

Homo Sapiens have been around for about 300,000 years. That’s us. Before us, our ancestors roamed the planet without leaving much evidence as to what they got up to. 

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One August 2023 study may have uncovered the reason behind why there may be such little evidence of their history and culture.

There may not have been many of them left. It is speculated that some 900,000 to 800,000 years ago, these ancestors came very very close to complete extinction.

Scientific American

Losing 98.7% of their population, scientists were able to speculate that only 1,280 of them were breeding individuals. This small number remained in a diminished state for more than 100,000 years.

This number, scientists claim is comparable to that of endangered animals. For context, authors estimate that there may have been between 58,600 and 135,000 breeding individuals before the loss occurred.

Dan Odess

One factor, they speculate could have been the extreme cooling that the earth underwent some 900,000 years ago. 

Co-authors Yi-Hsuan Pan and Haipeng Li said, “We believe that our ancestors must have been well-united to fight against the harsh environment,” 

Universe Today

The study, authored by 9 scientists points out that this loss may explain the lack of fossil records in places like Africa since that was where droughts would have affected population the most.

Authors also speculated that this created a ‘bottleneck’ in human evolution and growth since there would have been little genetic diversity. This leads to questions about the evolutionary chain of Homo heidelbergensis, Neanderthals and Denisovans

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Not everyone however is in the same boat with these authors, with a comment added to the very journal it was published in. Aaron Ragsdale of the University of Wisconsin-Madison said, “This paper was met with quite a bit of skepticism within the scientific community.”

“There are critiques of both the methodology and interpretation of this study. I would like to see these results corroborated by independent methods and for the results to be validated with different features of genetic data.”

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Now it remains to be seen whether other studies would be able to replicate the findings of these tests.

“Altogether, I think it is a stretch to conclude definitively that human ancestral populations experienced such a severe decline in actual population size for that extended period of time,” Raggsdale added.