[defrost]

Interesting book, very hard to tell whether you're a serious twue believer or just engaged in some wry leg pulling:

    Howy Jacobs in Nature labelled the book as semi-fictional with the majority of the information "the accounts of the imagined lives" of human ancestors. He commented: "All this made me feel that I was reading someone's school project, with influences from The Flintstones cartoon series, rather than a treatise by a leading academic."

The wikipedia summary didn't give a time frame for the book events, however the Laschamp event was 42 thousand years before prest .. after the settling of coastal and much of inland Asia, Australia, etc.

It seems a little near in time for a literal bottleneck of seven women's genetics, I feel even Bryan Sykes would have pushed back his dating of the seven clan mothers further than a mere 42 kyears.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Laschamp_event

[rsync]

"It seems a little near in time for a literal bottleneck of seven women's genetics ..."

The bottleneck was figurative. No actual bottle was involved.

(I have five figures of karma with which to fight this battle).

[o11c]

A lot of people misunderstand figurative bottlenecks too.

The "7 women" does not mean anything like "only 7 women existed at the time". Particularly:

* other women existed who only had sons, or whose daughters only had sons, etc. See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Galton%E2%80%93Watson_process (about surname extinction, which is basically the same thing other than sex-specific polygamy effects)

* other tribes existed (or split off) who later faced extinction due to being outcompeted by these 7 tribes.

[arcanemachiner]

> used for emphasis or to express strong feeling while not being literally true.

The word got misused so many times that Oxford modified the definition, and the wrong way is now right, by consensus.

Ah, the joys of a living language.

[gosub100]

I want a browser filter that just removes the word. It almost never adds to the content, it's just a styrofoam filler word.