18 Million Years Ago Means...500,000?

[swamidass (S. Joshua Swamidass)]

Thanks for the answer @glipsnort. This not about the detailed wording of the new version. That’s a minor point.

Of course some conclusions are the same too. Both versions conclude there is evidence for common descent. But the focus of the article (and the 2011 CT article it was addressing) was on ancestral population sizes.

On that matter, population sizes, they claim that the conclusions are “unchanged.” Do you agree with this or not?

This is the original conclusion…

@swamidass

In the previous article in this series, we’ve examined several of the converging lines of evidence that support the conclusion that our lineage became human as a population – one that has not numbered below about 10,000 individuals over the last 18 million years or more.

Is it the same as this conclusion?:

@swamidass

all the genetic evidence to date says that the average breeding population of our ancestors has been larger than a single couple for at least the last 200,000 years, and there is no plausible model affirming a single, unique pair of progenitors less than 500,000 years ago that also accounts for the data we see in the genes of people alive today.

If they are different, do you think it is correct to say the conclusions are “unchanged”? It seems you think one conclusion was unchanged, and the other was changed?