The less trodden Northern Tanzanian precincts of Laetoli and Olduvai in Ngorongoro District of Arusha, may have been the origin of all humans that are currently walking the earth.
The early hominid footprints at Laetoli, for instance, date back to some 4 million years.
However, science points out that humanity came close to extinction some 800,000 years ago, with just a small percentage pulling through.
Just like the dinosaurs, people could have been annihilated from the earth due to mostly natural catalysts.
In fact, the current global population, according to scientists, arises from the only 1,280 human ancestors that somehow managed to survive the catastrophe.
A recent study published in ‘Science,’ suggests that a disastrous ‘ancestral bottleneck,’ reduced the world population to just 1,280 breeding individuals.
The historical incident reportedly wiped out over 98.7 percent of the early human lineage.
This population crash, lasting about 117,000 years, likely is believed to have resulted from extreme climate shifts, prolonged droughts and dwindling food sources on earth, among other causes.
It is therefore surprising that the global population of 8 billion residents could have multiplied from just 1.3 percent of the total humans that managed to survive the natural holocaust.
Using a groundbreaking genetic analysis method called FitCoal, researchers analyzed modern human genomes to trace this dramatic decline, potentially explaining a gap in the African and Eurasian fossil record.
But despite the near-extinction, this bottleneck may have played a crucial role in shaping modern humans.
Scientists believe it contributed to a key evolutionary event, known as ‘chromosome fusion,’ which may have set Homo sapiens apart from earlier hominin species, including Neanderthals and Denisovans.
The study raises intriguing questions about how this small population survived, possibly through early use of fire and adaptive intelligence.
Understanding this ancient crisis helps scientists to piece together the story of human evolution and the resilience that allowed the current existing species to thrive against all odds.