A note added to this article:
Construction Zone! Note added January 2020. This piece is under revision and will be updated over the next few months to reflect current research. The main conclusion of the piece is correct: 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. Although much of the piece is good, it includes some overstatements and inconsistencies, and needs updates to reflect scholarship since 2014. Population genetics measures the average population, not a minimum population; it measures the breeding population, not the census population; and current methods cannot speak to times more than 500,000 years ago.
This note is in error. Some of the errors in this document were never consistent with mainstream science and should have been known to be in error in 2014. Moreover, some of these errors are repeated in the Adam and the Genome book. I wonder if there will be retractions or correction of the errors in that book. Likewise, there are many examples of plausible sole-progenitor models that have very recent dates, including, for example, the Young Adam Creation (YAC) speculation in the GAE.
Some of the same errors, also, have been found here, in this historically important article from 2010, which was silently deleted this week. Deleted: Does Genetics Point to a Single Primal Couple?