Monday, October 21, 2013

Examples of Population Bottlenecks

Now what exactly is a population bottleneck? It's when due to some event, a population faces near extinction and is given either two options, make a miraculous recovery or forever be forgotten from the pages of time.

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Perhaps the most recent bottleneck event took place in the 90's during the Chechen-Russian wars. Chechnya lost 20% of it's population but partly thanks to the manner in which Islam promotes child birth, the average Chechen woman was able to pump out several kids and now the Chechen population is bigger than it was pre-war population. A complete 360 recovery:

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Another turbulent time in the Caucasus was during the Mongol invasions. In a span of a century 30,000,000 – 60,000,000 people globally were dead and that figure would be substantially higher if we include the Timurid invasions. Most of the dead were people who arrogantly tried to be heroes rather than swallowing their pride and submitting, the North Caucasians were one of these people and for this they payed dearly:


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Perhaps this is the reason why Adygei (Circassians) and north-Ossetians are the most Mongoloid people in the north Caucasus, with 7% being the average:


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Another example of a bottleneck is during the Hebrew exile in Mesopotamia, slowly assimilating into the urban populations when the Persians came and liberated them, brought them back to their ancestral homeland and created policies protecting Jewish customs, language and way of life. We know this through a cuneiform cylinder recovered in Mesopotamia.

"The Cylinder's text has traditionally been seen by Biblical scholars as corroborative evidence of Cyrus’ policy of the repatriation of the Jewish people following their Babylonian captivity (an act that the Book of Ezra attributes to Cyrus), as the text refers to the restoration of cult sanctuaries and repatriation of deported peoples."


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