Reply #5: That "nearly extinct" claim is questionable [View All]

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The claim comes out of DNA studies -- but more skeptical reviews have suggested that all the studies mean is that Homo sapiens was evolving rapidly, so we're all descended from the few thousand individuals who were most "modern" and not those who were still relatively archaoc.

Another article I saw recently pointed out that the same kind of DNA studies show an equally low number of human ancestors at every point over the last 1.2 million years. Again, it doesn't seem to mean that we've been an endangered species all that time, but that we've been evolving very quickly -- and leaving much of our genetic inheritance behind us as we do.