| Online: | |
| Visits: | |
| Stories: |
| Story Views | |
| Now: | |
| Last Hour: | |
| Last 24 Hours: | |
| Total: | |
Can Two People Repopulate Earth?
Short answer: Maybe, but they’d be very busy
Sci-Fi movies present no shortage of doomsday scenarios–asteroids, climate change and supervolcanoes just to name a few. But let’s say that one of these situations actually occurs, and humans are annihilated with the exception of one male and one female. Could humanity survive?
The answer is a resounding…maybe, with the only certainty being that the surviving couple is going to be very, very busy.
Variations on this scenario occur now and again in nature. They’re called bottlenecks, and they include any event that causes a drastic reduction in a population–think overhunting and natural disasters. Certain species, like dandelions, are great at bouncing back from bottlenecks. Mow them down, and they’ll be back before you know it. “One dandelion seed in your yard produces thousands of dandelion seeds that are each genetically identical and spread exponentially,” explains Nolan Kane, a genomics professor at the University of Colorado Boulder. But humans are not dandelions; we require another human and about nine months to reproduce.
