They withered under study.
There’s been a lively discussion between geneticists Dennis Venema and Richard Buggs and about whether the human race must have had more than one pair of ancestors (Venema yes, Buggs no).
From Evolution News and Science Today:
Earlier, we saw that evolutionary genomicist Richard Buggs has been engaged in a dialogue with Venema about the latter’s arguments against a short bottleneck of two individuals in human history. Buggs is skeptical that methods of measuring human genetic diversity cited by Venema can adequately test such an “Adam and Eve” hypothesis. Buggs’s initial email to Venema thus concluded, “I would encourage you to step back a bit from the strong claims you are making that a two person bottleneck is disproven.”
Buggs agreed with Venema that one particular metric — human allelic diversity — might be capable of testing the issue. But he wanted to know more details about the population genetics models that Venema was relying on. In reply to Venema’s response to his initial email, Buggs asked Venema to provide a citation. He requested some backup for the repeated claims that human allelic diversity indicates we evolved from an ancestral population of about 10,000 individuals.
Ultimately Dr. Venema was unable to provide a scientific citation to substantiate his claim. To be fair to Venema, he says he believes that he has provided an adequate citation. And no doubt he sincerely does believe it. There is no accusation of bad faith here. But Buggs has clearly shown that Venema did not provide adequate backup. This means that Venema’s claims against Adam and Eve are scientifically suspect and intellectually unpersuasive. In fact, Buggs has shown that some of Venema’s citations don’t even address the question of the ancestral population size of humans. This gives the appearance of “citation bluffing,” however unwitting. More.
See also: Are Adam and Eve genetically possible? The latest: Richard Buggs (yes) replies to Dennis Venema (no)