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No, it doesn't mean that. The bottleneck doesn't say anything about how many people were alive then, just how many contributed DNA surviving until present day.
by titzer 3y ago
No, it doesn't mean that. The bottleneck doesn't say anything about how many people were alive then, just how many contributed DNA surviving until present day. There could have been millions of individuals whose offspring eventually ended up as genetic dead ends and we'd never know, except for fossils.
- taneq 3y agoWould we get the same result from a few millennia of a tribal social structure where only the chief gets to impregnate the women?
- fspear 3y agoThe next bottleneck will not be caused by climate change challenges but by tinder and out of control hypergamy.
- neuronic 3y agoGood luck making that happen when human male teenagers are on average the most aggressive and unreasonable version of our species.
- taneq 3y agoI meant half a million years ago when (so the narrative goes) Big Leader Ug ruled a small band of early humans by physical force and could club anyone who wanted to mate with Ug's Womans. I was wondering if a protracted period of this could produce an equivalent genetic effect to a single population choke point under the relatively modern assumption that humans pair off. Of course that doesn't mesh with the simultaneous narrative that humans haven't significantly changed biologically since then. You get that.