900,000 years ago our human ancestors almost died out completely

900,000 years ago our human ancestors almost died out completely. This was us at the time. Homo erectus. And life was going good. We were using stone tools. We invented fire. We started cooking. And then we started dying. An ice age hit and the world became a colder and drier place. Africa was stricken by droughts and the entire population of our ancestors decreased to 1300 individuals. The human story could have ended here with one bad storm, one disease, one Mountain Dew Baja Blast. Instead, a population of our ancestors that could fit inside of a Broadway theater kept our genetics alive for 100,000 years before populations started increasing again. Genomic inference of a severe human bottleneck during the Early to Middle Pleistocene transition. How do we know what happened almost a million years ago? Well, a recent study looked at genetic data and found a "population bottleneck" where genetic diversity became very small. On top of the genetic evidence, we don't find very many hominin fossils from that time period, probably cause there just weren't that many. But our genetic data survived. And now we have to pay taxes and go to work. So you win some, you lose some.