Talk:Population bottleneck

European Bison in South Dakota

"The animals living today are all descended (except those in South Dakota at the time), from 12 individuals ..."

This really could do with some explanation. What were European Bison doing in South Dakota? Were they reintroduced into the gene pool? -- Q Chris (talk) 12:17, 18 March 2020 (UTC)

Genetic Drift

It seems as if the concept of genetic drift is misused in this article. In Wikipedia's article on genetic drift itself, it says that it's random, which is how I always understood it. But in the population bottleneck article, it is said to be a result of the bottleneck. That's not random. 142.254.109.112 (talk) 13:23, 13 September 2022 (UTC)

930 Kya human population crash to 1,280

FYI.

Subject articles:

NY Times: https://www.nytimes.com/2023/08/31/science/human-survival-bottleneck.html

Original paper: https://doi.org/10.1126/science.abq7487

—Danorton (talk) 14:24, 1 September 2023 (UTC)

Neolithic reproductive patterns

The Neolithic Y-chromosome bottleneck refers to a period around 5000 BC where the diversity in the male y-chromosome dropped precipitously, to a level equivalent to reproduction occurring with a ratio between men and women of 1:17.[12] Discovered in 2015[13] the research suggests that the reason for the bottleneck was not a reduction in the number of males, but a drastic decrease in the percentage of males with reproductive success.

This isn't correct. The data doesn't necessarily show that only one man had reproductive success for every seventeen women (i.e., that a lot of women shared a few men), and the sources don't claim that. It says that one Y-chromosome line survived for every seven mitochondrial lines, and the more recent source (and the paper it's based on) says that this most likely is due to differences in kinship impacts along the male and female lines. For example, let's assume that Al and Ally are completely monogamous and have several sons and several daughters. If all of Al and Ally's sons' sons' sons stay in the Alson tribe, but all of Al and Ally's daughters' daughters' daughters have married into a dozen surrounding tribes, then the Alson tribe dying out wipes out Al's Y-chromosome but not Ally's mitochondrial line, even though Ally and Al have (and always will have) exactly the same number of surviving descendants and therefore the same reproductive success. And if this happens over and over with a whole bunch of patrilineal tribes, as it apparently did, then eventually you have a lot less Y-chromosome variation than mitochondrial variation.

I'm not sure how to express this in Wikipedia-style prose. Can anyone help me with that? Starry Void (talk) 06:24, 27 January 2024 (UTC)

Concerning the Humans section

Hi all, just curious, should we order human population bottlenecks in chronological order according to date of the bottleneck or date of the discovery of the bottleneck? I'm just having trouble trying to figure out how to make them into individual sections, cause at present there's so much information being thrown at you from so many different directions that its impossible to focus on any one particular thing. CSGinger14 (talk) 18:35, 14 August 2026 (UTC)