John Hawks has a very nice post for people with basic math, explaining why a recent press release announced that 70,000 years ago the human species encountered a population bottleneck of 2000 individuals, and why it's most likely wrong. In the process he explains effective population size. It's a tad too complex even for an Intermediate Concepts post, but still worth the effort. Larry Moran at his blog has opened a comments thread, as the Hawks blog is comment free (I am unsure if I should be censorial or jealous), and John promises to come back and answer them.
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