Is deep learning the only way to detect humans in a picture?
One of the popular feature descriptors used for human detection is HOG - Histogram of Oriented Gradients. Usually you would train a classifier for recognizing human vs non-human, and then you would implement a sliding window technique. HOG has implementations in most of the scientific libraries in the Python community, for example in skimage there is an example here, which I am copying here because a link could always become broken:

import matplotlib.pyplot as plt

from skimage.feature import hog
from skimage import data, exposure


image = data.astronaut()

fd, hog_image = hog(image, orientations=8, pixels_per_cell=(16, 16),
                    cells_per_block=(1, 1), visualize=True, multichannel=True)

fig, (ax1, ax2) = plt.subplots(1, 2, figsize=(8, 4), sharex=True, sharey=True)

ax1.axis('off')
ax1.imshow(image, cmap=plt.cm.gray)
ax1.set_title('Input image')

# Rescale histogram for better display
hog_image_rescaled = exposure.rescale_intensity(hog_image, in_range=(0, 10))

ax2.axis('off')
ax2.imshow(hog_image_rescaled, cmap=plt.cm.gray)
ax2.set_title('Histogram of Oriented Gradients')
plt.show()