#9 bombay, it seems like a diff. But pulling through with 70K is almost as much of a sheer luck as with 2K. It depends on circumstances--like stability of the environment in the days after and how fast people faned out in smaller groups to prevent pandemic conditions taking a toll.
One thing with the 2k @ 60,000 BCE...
The Australian Aborigines seem to have a continuous presence in Australia for at least 75,000 years. It seems that whatever happened to the rest of humanity, it passed them by. They never were present in great numbers, but enough to sustain themselves. In fact, they had something of a small "population explosion" roughly 50,000 BCE and some moved eastward in their sturdy boats, reaching South America. There they lived happily and spread as far as the northern glacial edge, only to be wiped out, gradually, by newly arriving Amerindians from about 10,000 BCE onward. A small group of caucasian stock folks that arrived earlier did not seem to be as ambitious and despite their larger physical frame, and a superior quality of stone industries, they left the original inhabitants largely alone. For the most part, they were concentrated in a Great Lakes area where copper nuggets (aye, even several ton copper boulders) were found readily on the ground. They later dug shallow mines, too. These red haired folks may have had a solid presence until the middle of second millennium BCE. Thence they appeared only in small numbers, found buried in some of the mounds with scores of Amerindians, until about 300 BCE, depending on dating that may be not exactly accurate.
The later scarce caucasoid burials are probably related to new intruders from east, first Phoenicians (they preferred Central America region) and later Vikings from about 600 CE to 1100 CE. |