The Year We Almost Vanished

Past a few thousand years, the family tree doesn't branch — it converges. Pull it far enough back and every human alive today arrives at the same small cluster of people, standing in the same narrow corner of one continent, wondering if tomorrow will come. Because for a while, it almost didn't. Something happened — a supervolcano, a shift in climate, or both — and the number of humans left breathing fell to something that geneticists still argue about: perhaps ten thousand. Perhaps fewer. A number you could fit into a small town. A number that, spread across an entire planet, is basically silence. You carry the proof of that silence in every cell you own. Your DNA is unnervingly similar to the person next to you — far more similar than it should be, far more similar than any other great ape's. Lions have more variety. Chimpanzees have more variety. We are, genetically speaking, a very young species that only just made it. The strangest part is what was lost. Any person alive before that narrowing — any variant, any difference, any line — is simply gone. Not buried somewhere in your code. Erased. The people you carry are the people who squeezed through. Everyone else is a door that closed. And you have no idea what was on the other side.