What’s the minimum amount of people needed to repopulate the earth after an apocalypse? Please explain from a genetics POV how we know what is an acceptable size for the gene pool not to cause too many problems.

Question

Whenever I see a film that ends with it being up to a small group of survivors to repopulate the earth, I often find myself thinking that that group seems too small not to cause genetic problems within a few generations – too many cousins marrying each other and whatnot. You catch my drift hopefully.

In: Biology

Answer 1

70,000 years ago the human population was brought down to 1 to 10 thousand individuals after the Tunguska meteor strike.

Whoops, wrong natural disaster. Comment below corrected me.