[dotnet00]

IIRC all of humanity outside of Africa has gone through a tight population bottleneck at some point, such that a massive portion of human history can probably trace its root to a group of early humans managing to survive a certain encounter, none of which would've existed if they hadn't survived.

[hollerith]

The severe bottleneck 800,000 years ago includes the ancestors of all modern Africans.

[dotnet00]

Yeah was just coming back to edit after reading up on it. A bottleneck from 100k to 1000 human ancestors ~800,000 years ago for ~100,000 years.

https://www.science.org/doi/10.1126/science.abq7487

"Population size history is essential for studying human evolution. However, ancient population size history during the Pleistocene is notoriously difficult to unravel. In this study, we developed a fast infinitesimal time coalescent process (FitCoal) to circumvent this difficulty and calculated the composite likelihood for present-day human genomic sequences of 3154 individuals. Results showed that human ancestors went through a severe population bottleneck with about 1280 breeding individuals between around 930,000 and 813,000 years ago. The bottleneck lasted for about 117,000 years and brought human ancestors close to extinction. This bottleneck is congruent with a substantial chronological gap in the available African and Eurasian fossil record. Our results provide new insights into our ancestry and suggest a coincident speciation event."