A dieback in the human population to 10,000, or 2,000, cannot possibly be irrelevant to human evolution.
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Well yes it is - if humans evolve from what we are now, it will be from the genes we now have. Those genes which were lost in Toba don’t count - they are gone. Those lost genes cannot effect our future evolution.
For all we know if Toba had not happened we could all be morons now ... oh wait....
“For all we know if Toba had not happened we could all be morons now ... oh wait....”
Yuk, yuk.
Or if it had not happened we could all have Stephen Hawkings’ brains and Baywatch good looks.
My point is that it almost certainly had an effect.
You, for the first time, mention “future” evolution. Yes, pre-Toba genes are irrelevant to *future* evolution.
What I was wondering about was what the effects might have been of reducing the gene pool to 2,000 (or whatever the correct number is).