Humanity’s brush with extinction
From Times Staff and Wire Reports
Human beings may have had a brush with extinction 70,000 years ago, an extensive genetic study suggests.
The human population at that time was reduced to small isolated groups in Africa, apparently because of drought, according to an analysis published Thursday in the American Journal of Human Genetics.
The report noted that a separate study estimated that the number of early humans may have fallen as low as 2,000 before numbers began to expand again.
