What is a population bottleneck?
A population bottleneck is a severe reduction in population size for any given species which reduces the genetic diversity of that species. Now given the amount of time human beings have existed on this planet there should be a reasonably wide range of genetic variation, yet human DNA is remarkably uniform throughout the world. Hence it is concluded that at some point in the past, the human species suffered its own population bottleneck, a dramatic decline in population caused by some unspecified natural disaster.1 For example, Lynn Jorde and Henry Harpending 2 from the University of Utah have studied the patterns of mitochondrial DNA (mtDNA) within the human population and have concluded that it is consistent with a dramatic reduction in population size at some point in our past, which they calculate occurred roughly 70-80,000 years ago when the human population was reduced to as few as 5 or 10,000 individuals. Volcanoes and supervolcanoes A normal volcano is formed by a column of mag
