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The Ādam Paradox Hypothesis 123
Part IV — Synchrony: When Lines Converge
Chapter 12
People Numbers and Social Nets
From fragile few to swelling tribes, numbers shaped the scale of human destiny.
Introduction: When Humanity Multiplied
Eighty thousand years ago, the human world was a paradox of abundance and
fragility. Africa offered all the resources that could sustain life — shellfish
clinging to rocky coasts, gazelles grazing in endless savannas, tubers and fruits
ripening in the forests, and bees nesting in hollow trees, dripping with honey.
Yet across this richness, the human presence was faint. Our ancestors existed
as scattered sparks, small fires glowing in the darkness of a vast continent. A
band here, another there, each no larger than a few dozen individuals.
Together, perhaps, no more than a few thousand breeding humans lived across
the entire planet.
Modern genomics supports this picture with sobering clarity. The effective
population size of Homo sapiens during this period is estimated at fewer than
10,000 breeding individuals (Henn, Cavalli-Sforza, & Feldman, 2012). In
biological terms, this meant that humanity was balanced on the edge of
extinction. To visualize: in a modern football stadium today, a crowd of 70,000
to 90,000 people cheer in unison. At that time, one such stadium could have
held the entire species. If a drought, epidemic, or volcanic catastrophe had
swept across Africa, Homo sapiens might have disappeared without trace —
just another evolutionary experiment that failed.
And yet, in a breathtakingly short span of time — a mere few tens of
millennia, the blink of an evolutionary eye — the situation changed utterly. By
40,000 years ago, humans had become a planetary force.