That reminds me of a thought I was thinking a while ago: What if Noah and his family really were the only survivors of a world wide catastrophe? How long, how many generations would it take to recreate a solid population?
The Bible doesn't tell much, only that there was Noah, his wife and his three sons Shem, Ham, and Japheth with their wives. It also tells that Noah had sixteen grandsons and also names a bunch of their sons and hinting to others. But there's no mentioning about their mothers...
My calculations were based on the assumption that about a dozen children used to be quite normal back in the days of no birth control and that some of them usually died very young, and that approximately half of them were girls. So it seemed realistic to assume that the three sons had approximately ten children each to reach adulthood. That means fifteen couples. If they were equally fertile, they would have 150 children which means 75 pairs. And further, they would again tenfold the population to 750 and so on and so forth. Of course that kind of steady growth requires both shelter and food for all them to live but in theory it would only take four generations after the deluge to reach the numbers mentioned in the article.
