

Explosive hypothesis about humans' lack of genetic diversity - BadCookie
http://www.kqed.org/quest/blog/2008/03/17/explosive-hypothesis-about-humans-lack-of-genetic-diversity

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iwwr
The hypothesis is neither explosive, nor new.

More here:
[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Toba_catastrophe_theory#Genetic...](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Toba_catastrophe_theory#Genetic_bottleneck_theory)

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EwanG
I think by "explosive" they were talking about the volcano, not that the
theory was that sensational. Granted the choice of the natural pun was
probably not the best... :-)

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_sh
If the Indonesian volcano reduced the human population to 1000-10000 breeding
pairs, would it not also have reduced the chimpanzee population similarly?

It's an interesting hypothesis, but similar to the idea that the Yacutan
asteroid wiped out the dinosaur population. If that were the case, how did
other species survive?

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nivertech
Look at figure 3 in this PDF:

<http://napobo3.lk.net/dna/Behar_2010.pdf>

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tectonic
If true, it's remarkable that we exist today at all.

