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
Well, to judge by past experience,
> A 2005 study from Rutgers University theorized that the pre-1492 native populations of the Americas are the descendants of only 70 individuals who crossed the land bridge between Asia and North America.[9]
There would have been others, who have no living descendants. And of course, that doesn’t mean they didn’t have inbreeding problems.
> In 2000, a Molecular Biology and Evolution paper suggested a transplanting model or a ‘long bottleneck’ to account for the limited genetic variation, rather than a catastrophic environmental change.[8] This would be consistent with suggestions that in sub-Saharan Africa numbers could have dropped at times as low as 2,000, for perhaps as long as 100,000 years, before numbers began to expand again in the Late Stone Age.[15]
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Population_bottleneck
See also “Minimum viable population”
Latest Answers