Did we evolve from 10,000 people in Africa?

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The oft-heard claim is that Homo sapiens evolved from Homo erectus within a small African population with an effective size of about 10,000 individuals. What, exactly is an “effective” population size and how is that different from a “census” population size? Strangely, nobody seems to be able to identify that “population” from which we supposedly arose.

Earlier discussion on Africa on BiblicalGenetics.com:

• Was Africa the Cradle of Humanity?
• Did Eve live in southern Africa?

Some background reading:

• Henn et al. 2012. The great human expansion. PNAS 109(44):17758–17764.
• Ashraf and Lawson. 2022. Genetic drift from the out-of-Africa bottleneck leads to biased estimation of genetic architecture and selection. E J Hum Gen 29:1549–1556.
• Tournebize et al. 2022. Reconstructing the history of founder events using genome-wide patterns of allele sharing across individuals. PLoS Gen 18(6):e1010243.