Today, there are over 8 billion humans living on our planet. However, if we had looked at the world between 800,000 and 900,000 years ago, the picture would have been shockingly different. New scientific findings shed new light on our ancestors and point to an important human speciation event. Indeed, Scientists are only now shedding light on a previously unknown period in human evolutionary history. According to a new study, early humans known as 'Homo erectus' nearly went extinct less than 1 million years ago, likely due to extreme ice age conditions.

According to genetic evidence, between 813,000 and 930,000 years ago, modern humans' ancestors experienced a severe bottleneck, losing approximately 98.7% of their breeding population. Remarkably, our forefathers faced extinction due to a severe population bottleneck that lasted for a heck of a bloody long time. In fact, our ancestors' estimated population size was so small, they would almost certainly have gone extinct if not for shear determination and dumb luck.

A study, titled 'Genomic inference of a severe human bottleneck during the Early to Middle Pleistocene transition', demonstrates this fact. The evidence shows that the human population remaining very small, but stable for more than 100,000 years, also fueled the divergence of modern humans, Neanderthals and the so-called Denisovans.