A lot of the results are older than, well, last week.
I believe this idea was even mentioned in a National Geographic documentary. Humans are smart because they're the descendants of a small group (some say around 2000 - so much for inbreeding being bad for your offspring, I guess) that managed to survive some terrible event at some point. The dumber ones died off.
Along those lines, btw, I read somewhere that even after this near extinction it was still only a limited number of people that actually produced any offspring. The worst example of this is the Inca and the Dahomey empires where only the emperor / king and a few highly placed officials could actually have sex, but even in Medieval Europe most peasant males (that is to say, most of the population) did not have any children at all.
This is the most astounding news story I've read in a month. It is amazing that something like this could have happened as recently as 70,000 years ago. It does finally explain the African Eve, though.
What do you mean that it "finally explains the African Eve"? There would have to be a last universal common female ancestor whether this had happened or not.
Also amazing is how this recent population decline and rebound of people based in Africa was only a few dozens of millenia away from the "mitochondrial blonde" (if you will) 6-10k years agohttp://www.ku.dk/english/news/?content=http://www.ku.dk/engl...
Not sure if this is the same as the Mt Toba supervolcano eruption 74,000 years ago in Sumatra that started a 1000 year long ice age and probably reduced the human population to 10'000 individuals: http://www.bradshawfoundation.com/journey/
