Walt writes:
[...]
>Except for major catastrophes in one area or another another, the
>growth of the human population has been continuous (as best I see the
>literature). [...]
You are right in thinking that a population expansion will make
it harder to win the "last common mother or father 'lottery'".
However, the human population has experienced its current
level of expansion for only the past few thousand years or so.
The current rate of population growth is a relatively recent
development. If you took our current growth rate as a constant
and extrapolated backwards, you'd calculate that the population
was *zero* less than 10,000 years ago. That's clearly not the
case and so the human species must have bounced around a near-
zero growth rate with a much smaller population (few millions or
less) for the preceding millennia.
The proposed dates for 'Mitochondrial Eve' and 'Y-chromosome Adam'
are in the range of tens to hundreds of thousands years BC, a long
period where human population growth was often "flat" and sometimes
even negative. It's likely that the current mitochondrial Eve was
'crowned' long before humans started their recent, explosive growth.
Regards,
Tim Ikeda (tikeda@sprintmail.com)
This archive was generated by hypermail 2b29 : Fri Apr 26 2002 - 10:09:12 EDT