Quote Originally Posted by Ibrahim View Post

Inbreeding does indeed tend to cause serious trouble over generations, regardless of the genetic pool of the species (Ludens?), though it can get sharper in effect with a shrinking group. the Reason is because it tends to concentrate defective, or deleterious, mutations over a period of time, to the point of being incompatible with a healthy life. a simple example: suppose there are a pair, husband and wife, both having a gene, Xx. X is doinent, x is recessive. the recessive one gives people hell (say, born with bad hearts). the punett square will make the following children: XX, Xx, Xx, and xx. now, lets mate two at random, and see how the xx (bad heart) concentration changes. believe me, it goes up very quickly.

Ibrahim beat me to it. There is not alot more I could add without repeating what he basically said or going into more real-life examples.

And ludens you are very right, humans have had a very small stock to draw from in the past. There are some theories that the human population (or almost human creature thingy's on the evolution scale) may have gone as low as a few thousand people scattered over a country sized area at at least one and possibly other points in our history.

We are also supposedly linked to one woman (really old corpse) that was found who happens to have an almost exact match of a DNA that we have in a location that is not prone to mutations (coz mutations there lead to death - i think number of fingers and heart function are closely linked). This means that if that scientific paper was not lying, then we are all brothers from another mother. Although I think it could be faked. Getting DNA of any kind, especially accurate DNA from a 100,000yr old corpse no matter how preserved is close to impossible I thought.

Anyone able to provide more info on this? I think it might have been the 'Lucy' corpse that they found.