Historic Population Wipe-outs

"I'll be right back, Eve. I need to use the restroom."

A recent AP article says this:

Wells is director of the Genographic Project, launched in 2005 to study anthropology using genetics. The report was published in the American Journal of Human Genetics.
Previous studies using mitochondrial DNA — which is passed down through mothers — have traced modern humans to a single "mitochondrial Eve," who lived in Africa about 200,000 years ago.
The migrations of humans out of Africa to populate the rest of the world appear to have begun about 60,000 years ago, but little has been known about humans between Eve and that dispersal.
The new study looks at the mitochondrial DNA of the Khoi and San people in South Africa which appear to have diverged from other people between 90,000 and 150,000 years ago.
The researchers led by Doron Behar of Rambam Medical Center in Haifa, Israel and Saharon Rosset of IBM T.J. Watson Research Center in Yorktown Heights, N.Y., and Tel Aviv University concluded that humans separated into small populations prior to the Stone Age, when they came back together and began to increase in numbers and spread to other areas.
Eastern Africa experienced a series of severe droughts between 135,000 and 90,000 years ago and the researchers said this climatological shift may have contributed to the population changes, dividing into small, isolated groups which developed independently.
Paleontologist Meave Leakey, a Genographic adviser, commented: "Who would have thought that as recently as 70,000 years ago, extremes of climate had reduced our population to such small numbers that we were on the very edge of extinction."

My comment is this: The Genesis text does not easily jibe with these kinds of numbers. We have a biblical chronology in two ancient texts that veers considerably from this scientific speculation. Who is correct, then: ancient scribes who wrote down what they learned from oral tradition or modern scientists skrying the contents of the DNA puzzle? Neither method of dating the human prehistory would seem to be completely accurate; but the emergence of DNA information is certainly intriguing and plays with our assumptions about these things.

What we do have here is the possibility of fluctuations in populations of the developing homo sapien. This means that there were possible near wipe-outs in that long and arduous journey of man. Further, it would be possible that a real flesh-and-blood man named Adam could have come on the scene in one of those population dearths. He would then have provided us with both a symbol of all humanity as embodied in one man and as an actual person whose existence was passed on by oral tradition.

The rest of the story gets a bit murky back there. We can't really count on "facts" at that point, so we are left to speculate. Still, Adam need not be dismissed as a fairy tale.