Human ancestors nearly went extinct 900,000 years ago

Roughly 900,000 years ago, climate changes sweeping the globe might have pushed our distant ancestors to the brink of extinction. The unknown human-like species was reduced to just 1,280 breeding individuals, creating a genetic bottleneck that is still detectable in the DNA of modern-day humans. The population didn’t expand for more than 100,000 years, after which it bloomed again and the progenitors of our species and of our extinct relatives, the Denisovans and the Neanderthals, emerged.