“The problem is that science has now shown that monogenism ― in the sense of the descent of our entire species from one set of parents, Adam and Eve ― is genetically impossible. In-breeding reduces population viability because the resulting lack of genetic diversity makes the population more susceptible to disease and trauma. When a species falls below a certain threshold of breeding pairs, it reaches what is called a “genetic bottleneck,” carrying the risk that the population will suffer irreversible genetic degradation. Humans appear not to have suffered catastrophic bottlenecks within the last ten thousand years, although the climatic results of Sumatra’s Mt. Toba eruption were severe enough to reduce the population significantly. It is estimated by some that the minimum population during the tens of thousands of years of it took hominids to evolve into full human consciousness was between 3,000 and 10,000 breeding pairs.”
References:
“The European bison, the cheetah, and the giant panda are all animals with very low heterzygosity, and thus are suffering severe bottlenecks. See Ridley,
Evolution 3rd. ed., (Blackwell Publishing), 151 - 153; Menotti-Raymond and O’Brien, “Dating the Genetic Bottleneck of the African cheetah,” Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences 90, 3172-3176, (1993).”
John Hawks, et al. “Population Bottlenecks and Pleistocene Human Evolution,”
Molecular Biology and Evolution 17:2-22 (2000); Xiong et al, “No severe bottleneck during human evolution; evidence from two apolipoprotein C II alleles’, Am J Hum Genet 48, 383 -389.
Stanley H. Ambrose (1998). “Late Pleistocene human population bottlenecks, volcanic winter, and differentiation of modern humans”
Journal of Human Evolution 34 (6): 623–651.
Alec MacAndrew, “Misconceptions around Mitochondrial Eve: A Critique of Carl Wieland’s AiG article on Mitochondrial Eve,” at
evolutionpages.com/Mitochondrial%20Eve.htm.