You Almost Didn’t Exist
900,000 years ago, the world contained about 1,300 people. That’s it. Imagine the size of the world, and now imagine only 1,300 people walking around.
Our ancestors came within a hair’s breadth of extinction, and populations remained that low for the next 100,000 years or more, researchers argue today in Science.
No one knows what caused the population dip, if it impacted all populations, or what happened to cause the population to rise again, but I wonder if people living during that time felt lonely. If they had any concept of how small their numbers had dwindled and whether they took any active measures to rebuild their groupings.
Something to think about on a Sunday morning.
1 comment
Fascinating, as it says that the population they studied didn’t begin to increase again for another 120,000 years or so. I guess the people initially might have noticed dwindling numbers, but then it became the norm. I suppose it’s always been the case that it’s purely luck that we’re here – genetically, as individuals, and as communities, or as the human race.