Humans Almost Went Extinct: World Population Once Dropped to 1,280 People

There were few clues to lead scientists in the right direction—until now. Researchers have seemingly solved the centuries-long mystery of why it’s been so difficult to study parts of the human lifecycle from the past.

A collection of specialists from the United States, Italy, and China, have compared notes to determine why there is a lack of human fossil records that have been recovered throughout a specific period of time. Using a method called FitCoal, these experienced scientists were able to gain more insight into the elusive history of human beings.

FitCoal, the innovative technique that stands for “fast infinitesimal time coalescent process,” helped researchers make “demographic inferences” of precisely 3,154 humans. What scientists found next was truly mind-blowing. Believe it or not, they determined that the human population once fell to a mere 1,280 people.

Scientists uncovered evidence that led them to believe that an Earth-shattering event wiped out almost the entire human population many years ago. A severe climate shift created “extreme cooling conditions,” resulting in a near-extinction as the majority of humans were unable to survive the extreme cold.

The cooling event almost wiped human beings off the face of the planet. The 1,280 individuals who miraculously survived the climate shift would become responsible for repopulating the Earth and keeping humanity from the brink of extinction for the next 117,000 years.

He has praised the capabilities of FitCoal, saying, “The fact that FitCoal can detect the ancient severe bottleneck [event] with even a few sequences represents a breakthrough.” The scientific findings about the near-extinction of humans were published in the online edition of Science on August 31, 2023.

Giorgio Manzi, an anthropologist at Sapienza University of Rome, summed up why there was such a large gap in evidence of human life almost one million years ago. “The gap in the African and Eurasian fossil records can be explained by this bottleneck in the Early Stone Age as chronologically,” he said. 

Scientists are convinced that the freezing of the Earth was gradual and took place from the “early to middle Pleistocene era.” Researchers also estimate that the disaster eliminated 65.85% of the genetically diverse human beings that we typically see today.

“The novel finding opens a new field in human evolution because it evokes many questions, such as the places where these individuals lived, how they overcame the catastrophic climate changes, and whether natural selection during the bottleneck has accelerated the evolution of the human brain,” he said.

There’s no denying that people who were able to endure the elements were strong and prepared to combat whatever challenges came their way. Their story is a tale of resilience in the face of danger, and a closer look at what life was like for them could help researchers understand their skills and abilities as survivalists.

The tenacious humans were able to regulate their body temperature, allowing them to ward off the extreme cold. Early humans became so skilled at creating fire that they were comfortable enough to repopulate the Earth, resulting in a massive population increase nearly 813,000 years ago.

His goal is to “paint a more complete picture of evolution” by applying this new data as well as future research. He hopes that by studying the early to middle Pleistocene era, scientists will be able to “unravel the mystery that is early human ancestry and evolution.”