Humans almost went extinct!

CNN is reporting findings that were published in the American Journal of Human Genetics, reporting that early human populations may have had a brush with extinction 70,000 years ago. It is estimated that the number of early humans may have shrunk as low as 2,000, reduced to small isolated groups in Africa, apparently because of drought. Eastern Africa experienced a series of severe droughts between 135,000 and 90,000 years ago, and researchers said this climatological shift may have contributed to the population changes, dividing into small, isolated groups that developed independently. Recovering from this population bottleneck seems to have brought about migrations to other parts of the world which appears to have begun about 60,000 years ago.