Why Did Humans Almost Go Extinct 900,000 Years Ago?

About 900,000 years ago, our ancestors may have dropped to just 1,280 breeding individuals and stayed near that number for 117,000 years. A 2023 study in Science claims every one of the 8 billion people alive today descends from that tiny group. In this video we look at how geneticists found this bottleneck in the DNA of living people, what may have caused it (the Mid-Pleistocene Transition, droughts in Africa, the gap in the fossil record), how controlled fire may have helped our ancestors recover, and why many scientists still doubt the whole idea.