Today, over 8 billion people roam the Earth. But there was a time, long before history books, when humankind stood on the edge of extinction. Roughly 800,000 years ago , our ancient ancestors faced a devastating population bottleneck that could have ended the entire human story before it truly began. New scientific studies are shedding light on this little-known chapter of our evolutionary past—one where only a few thousand individuals stood between survival and extinction. This ancient near-extinction event drastically shaped the genetic diversity of modern humans and may hold key lessons about the fragility of life on Earth. The Shocking Discovery: A Genetic Bottleneck Scientists made this discovery by analyzing genomic data from modern humans , using advanced DNA sequencing and computational models to reconstruct ancient population sizes. According to research published in Science and Nature , the human population sharply declined about 800,000 years ago , shrinking to as few a...
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