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There are a couple of other questions that get CLOSE to this one, but mine is much more basic. The other estimates are for colony size or country size, and these take into account technology, accidents, disasters, etc. I want to know simply how many men and women, assuming an equal ratio of men to women and monogamy. I want to know how many people there needs to be to;

A) roughly maintain their numbers, growing slightly, but not more than 10%/year (I know the answers will be rough estimates)

and

B) not produce genetic decay due to limited genetic variance.

user
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Curious Layman
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    Can you explain why those other answers aren't relevant to your case? The population size to ensure a colony maintains healthy genetic diversity should satisfy your answer. There is an answer here that describes the numbers required given certain starting assumptions. Select the starting assumptions that most closely corresponds to your specifics (e.g. I think the number is 500 to 5000, depending upon the details of your needs). – Jim2B Mar 09 '16 at 05:21
  • Welcome aboard, Jimmy. Your question does not look related to the theme of this site (world building). It is more related to genetics and research with little concern about world building. Anyway, I won't vote a closure on your question and hope someone would reword it for fit the scope of this site :) – Youstay Igo Mar 09 '16 at 07:21
  • p.s. research on human genome suggests all modern day humans were born from a very small (around 20-50) group of humans who migrated out of Africa some 200,000 years ago. The bottleneck effect can be seen in some of human genes. Cheetahs also have extremely low genetic diversity but are still carrying on flawlessly so far. If you had 200 healthy people from different continents today, they should provide you with enough genetic diversity to not get wiped out by a single epidemic or pandemic that hits later in the course of history (after 2000 to 3000 years or so). – Youstay Igo Mar 09 '16 at 07:25
  • @YoustayIgo: Do you have a citation for that? My understanding was we've never dropped below several thousand. Wikipedia seems to support my notion, but it's not exactly the most in-depth article ever written. – MichaelS Mar 09 '16 at 08:08
  • @MichaelS: I rechecked. There are some articles stating that the human population was dropped to no more than 40 pairs (http://www.npr.org/sections/krulwich/2012/10/22/163397584/how-human-beings-almost-vanished-from-earth-in-70-000-b-c) but another study suggests that the population plummeted to 2000, not 20-50 as I had mentioned. p.s. you might like reading about Mitochondrial Eve (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mitochondrial_Eve) – Youstay Igo Mar 09 '16 at 08:50
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    Monogamy ? I strongly recommend to remove that criteria to get a better chance with your small colony. – Carlos2W Mar 09 '16 at 15:38
  • 10%/year growth rate is hardly "growing slightly"; it's basically a population explosion. With modern medicine in our real world, current population growth rates are below 2%/year. Compare What is a reasonable amount of population growth for 900 years?. To a first order approximation, to get a 10%/year population growth rate in humans, women would have very little time to recover; hardly sustainable. – user Mar 10 '16 at 08:41
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    possible duplicate: http://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/q/3/2071 – Pavel Janicek Mar 10 '16 at 08:51

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