I read in some museum in New Zealand that the original Maori population was something like 300-400 people (can't remember the precise number). That struck me as being too small (I had earlier read that 500 people were the minimum number to protect against in-breeding). However amongst Polynesians, in-breeding would have always been a problem since they were island settlers. It occurred to me that there may have been a form of natural selection at work with Polynesians, i.e. basic genetic weakness got weeded out early in the process of spreading across the Pacific. Polynesian communities with genetic weakness would have died out and been replaced by new communities with stronger genetics. It's possible that wandering hunter-gatherer American Indians went through a similar process.

Something that is fishy about the original story of 70 indians crossing the Bering Straits is they didn't do it in one go. Indians came to America in waves of migration over thousands of years with each wave either displacing the original inhabitants or wiping them out (a similar process happened in paleolithic Europe). Of course, modern indians are the ***surviving*** descendants of 70 different indians. There may have originally been 100,000 indians who crossed the Bering Staits land bridge but 99,930 of those indians and their descendants were killed off in inter-tribal warfare leaving only the ultra-tough survivors of today. It's interesting to think that we are all descended from ferocious merciless killers.

Gary