It was actually based on sound science, and it was 150,000 years ago. Not 50,000. 150,000 to 200,000 years ago the upright walking man, called Homo Erectus, began diverging into the animal who became modern man, called Homo Sapien, which all of us are. There actually was a Mitochondrial Eve, a single female who gave birth to children and established a gene pool that evolved into modern man. http://io9.com/5878996/how-mitochondrial-eve-connected-all-humanity-and-rewrote-human-evolution
Say what you want about the series or the ending, and believe me I loved both, but one cant argue the ending was make believe. It WAS based on actual science which can be proved by DNA analysis. BTW somehow the critter who became modern man really DID survive with only basic tools. Or no tools.
With all the lousy endings of series I found BSGs both fitting and beautiful. Yeah it was sad when Starbuck flew away as an Angel but at least she had lived life pretty well and banged 1/2 the fleet.
I didnt like how Sci Fy handled "Caprica" and it really pissed me off when they didnt pick up "Blood and Chrome". I thought that series had more of a future to it.
I stand corrected on the date, but the thing is, we did not develop much in the way of tool sets during that time, which is kind of what you'd expect if 20 000 humans with advanced knowledge arrived. Even if they had only developed simple things like pottery, the bow, or basic metallurgy, the effect would have been staggering at the time. The mitochondrial eve idea, which is based on science, would support the hypothesis that Hera's ancestral line was the only one that survived, all other Colonial and Cylon bloodlines died out in a couple of generations, and even Hera herself was killed as a young woman.
What doesn't make sense is that the Colonials didn't just give up on high tech, they gave up on *all* tech, because if they hadn't, there would have been a sudden spurt in human development at the time. We would have gone into the iron age if nothing else. To throw away even the basic tool-making skills that would have set them apart from the humans of the era was just plain suicide, and the net result fits in with the storyline: they all got wiped out, with the only thing surviving being Hera's DNA. From a point of view of plain old survival, the choice made by the Colonials made no sense at all. Maybe you give up firearms and more sophisticated tech, but could you not at least make some decent bows? An iron-headed spear? Maybe farming? If we are to believe that the Galactica timeline is our own, then the Colonials developed *nothing*, not even the most basic skills of civilization, which, given their intelligence, makes no sense at all. Can you seriously imagine that they wouldn't even craft so much as a hammer? Because according to the fossil record, they didn't.
