Apparently, the effective population size is far greater than 8.
Based on various shapes, sizes, and races of people, we darn well know everybody didn't descend from only one couple or some few couples within some few thousand generations ago. So then, why even bother frittering away at this.
"Effective population size (Ne) determines the amount of genetic variation, genetic drift, and linkage disequilibrium (LD) in populations. Here, we present the first genome-wide estimates of human effective population size from LD data. Chromosome-specific effective population size was estimated for all autosomes and the X chromosome from estimated LD between SNP pairs <100 kb apart. We account for variation in recombination rate by using coalescent-based estimates of fine-scale recombination rate from one sample and correlating these with LD in an independent sample. Phase I of the HapMap project produced between 18 and 22 million SNP pairs in samples from four populations: Yoruba from Ibadan (YRI), Nigeria; Japanese from Tokyo (JPT); Han Chinese from Beijing (HCB); and residents from Utah with ancestry from northern and western Europe (CEU). For CEU, JPT, and HCB, the estimate of effective population size, adjusted for SNP ascertainment bias, was
∼3100, whereas the estimate for the YRI was
∼7500, consistent with the out-of-Africa theory of ancestral human population expansion and concurrent bottlenecks."
Recent human effective population size estimated from linkage disequilibrium
Logo of genores
Genome Res. 2007 Apr; 17(4): 520–526.
doi: 10.1101/gr.6023607
PMCID: PMC1832099
PMID: 17351134
Recent human effective population size estimated from linkage disequilibrium
Albert Tenesa,1,2,3 Pau Navarro,3 Ben J. Hayes,4 David L. Duffy,5 Geraldine M. Clarke,6 Mike E. Goddard,4,7 and Peter M. Visscher3,