An unknown species of early human nearly died out around 900,000 years ago, according to genetic analysis. It may have been both the ancestor of Homo heidelbergensis and a species ancestral to our own.Credit: S. Entressangle/E. Daynes/Science Photo Library
Human ancestors in Africa were pushed to the brink of extinction around 900,000 years ago, a study shows. The work1, published in Science, suggests a drastic reduction in the population of our ancestors well before our species, Homo sapiens, emerged. The population of breeding individuals was reduced to just 1,280 and didn’t expand again for another 117,000 years.
“About 98.7% of human ancestors were lost,” says Haipeng Li, a population geneticist at the University of Chinese Academy of Sciences in Beijing, who co-led the study. He says that the fossil record in Africa and Eurasia between 950,000 and 650,000 years ago is patchy and that “the discovery of this bottleneck may explain the chronological gap”.
Nick Ashton, an archaeologist at the British Museum in London, who wrote a related perspective, says he was intrigued by the tiny size of the population. “This would imply that it occupied a very localized area wit
