[roughly]

Interestingly, even within Africa, the human genome notably lacks variability, to a point where it’s hypothesized that there was a fairly severe population bottleneck at some time in the last couple hundred thousand years.

[myhf]

oh gee i wonder what that bottleneck could have been

cough mysterious 1:4:9 monolith cough

[rbanffy]

I don’t remember exactly where I read that, but from mitochondrial DNA it was calculated that at some point we were down to 50 or so individuals.