The assumption that humanity needs 1 female and some eggs to repopulate is wrong.
This is what Lewis Dartnell had to say on the question:
“So what is the theoretical minimum needed for repopulation? Analysis of the mitochondrial DNA sequences in the Maori people living in New Zealand today has been used to estimate the number of founding pioneers who first arrived on rafts from Eastern Polynesia. The genetic diversity revealedthat the effective size of this ancestral population was no more than about seventy breeding females, and so a total population a little over twice that. A similar genetic analysis deduced a comparable founding population of the great majority of Native Americans, who are descended from ancestors who crossed the Bering land bridge from Eastern Asia 15,000 years ago when sea levels were lower. Thus a post-apocalyptic group of a few hundred men and women, all in the same place, ought to encapsulate sufficient genetic variability to repopulate the world.
The problem is that even with a growth rate of 2 percent per annum, the fastest the world’s population has ever grown when sustained by industrialized agriculture and modern medicine, it would still take eight centuries for this ancestral group to recover to the population of the time of the Industrial Revolution. (We’ll explore in later chapters the reasons why advanced scientific and technological developments probably require a certain population size and socioeconomic structure.) And such a diminished initial population would probably be far too small to be able to actually maintain reliable cultivation, let alone more advanced production methods, and so would regress all the way back to a hunter-gatherer lifestyle, preoccupied with the struggle for subsistence. Ninety-nine percent of human existence has been spent in this lifestyle, which cannot support dense populations and represents a trap that is very hard to progress out of again. How do you avoid regressing that far?”
The assumption that humanity needs 1 female and some eggs to repopulate is wrong.
This is what Lewis Dartnell had to say on the question:
“So what is the theoretical minimum needed for repopulation? Analysis of the mitochondrial DNA sequences in the Maori people living in New Zealand today has been used to estimate the number of founding pioneers who first arrived on rafts from Eastern Polynesia. The genetic diversity revealed that the effective size of this ancestral population was no more than about seventy breeding females, and so a total population a little over twice that. A similar genetic analysis deduced a comparable founding population of the great majority of Native Americans, who are descended from ancestors who crossed the Bering land bridge from Eastern Asia 15,000 years ago when sea levels were lower. Thus a post-apocalyptic group of a few hundred men and women, all in the same place, ought to encapsulate sufficient genetic variability to repopulate the world.
The problem is that even with a growth rate of 2 percent per annum, the fastest the world’s population has ever grown when sustained by industrialized agriculture and modern medicine, it would still take eight centuries for this ancestral group to recover to the population of the time of the Industrial Revolution. (We’ll explore in later chapters the reasons why advanced scientific and technological developments probably require a certain population size and socioeconomic structure.) And such a diminished initial population would probably be far too small to be able to actually maintain reliable cultivation, let alone more advanced production methods, and so would regress all the way back to a hunter-gatherer lifestyle, preoccupied with the struggle for subsistence. Ninety-nine percent of human existence has been spent in this lifestyle, which cannot support dense populations and represents a trap that is very hard to progress out of again. How do you avoid regressing that far?”