Humans nearly went extinct 1 million years ago, but we don’t know why

A study published in 2023 suggests that nearly 1 million years ago, humanity almost ceased to exist. This potential mass extinction event was discovered by researchers when they began analyzing the genetic data of 3,145 modern humans. The researchers suggest that the ancient population may have been reduced to roughly 1,200 humans.

Overall, the researchers believe that there could have been a bottleneck somewhere between 930,000 to 813,000 years ago, which led to a 98.7% reduction of humans on Earth.