Early humans nearly went EXTINCT 900,000 years ago when the population of our ancestors dropped to just 1,280 individuals, study claims

Early humans nearly went extinct 900,000 years ago when the population of our ancestors dropped to just 1,280 individuals, research suggests. A new study has found that the human race was almost wiped out as it approached a severe cooling period in the Earth's history known as the Middle Pleistocene. This severe'bottleneck' lasted over 100,000 years and was a threat to humanity as we know it today, experts say. A team from East China Normal University developed a model that could look at modern gene lineages and use them to estimate past population size. They used their model to analyse the DNA of 3,154 modern humans from both African and non-African populations.