1 min readJan 5, 2019
I agree that there were other bottlenecks and/or founder effects involved even in Africa. Hominins at various times and locations apparently survived a horrific series of bottlenecks: glacial advances in Eurasia tied up vast quantities of water and were at least partially responsible for “mega-droughts” in Africa. I’m not kidding about the “Mega” — these droughts lasted up to ten thousand years and reduced Lake Malawi to puddles of brackish sludge at the bottom of an African version of Death Valley at times.
Bottlenecks, therefore, produced by this combination of drought and ice, came thick and fast by the middle Pleistocene: no single bottleneck, but a series.
