Re: [asa] Humanity and the Fall: Questions and a Survey

>> If you go back far enough, humans have a single ancestor.
> Individually, of course, but this isn't the present notion of Homo sapiens
> speciation, is it? The current view is not a founder pair but a founder
> small population in the 10K range. I have also heard a recent report of a 2K
> bottleneck and near extinction event (drought caused) about 70,000 years
> through a Scientific American podcast. Haven't had a chance to follow up on
> the details.
>
It is not the present notion of Homo sapiens speciation, though
whether the theological questions about humanity should be restricted
to H. sapiens is another issue.

The founder population would need to be small enough for distinctive
H. sapiens genes to be established fairly quickly. I'm rather
skeptical about exact estimates of population size, since so many
factors affect the calculations, but it does seem likely that the
population would be small enough that everyone would be fairly closely
related in one way or another, and any one individual with descendants
would be an ancestor of everybody within a few generations.

-- 
Dr. David Campbell
425 Scientific Collections
University of Alabama
"I think of my happy condition, surrounded by acres of clams"
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