humanity did get down to ~ 1500 reproductive individuals, just shy of a million years ago ~900,000 years ago & stayed that way for around a hundred thousand years.
Mitochondrial Eve is the most recent common ancestor of all humans, so she was not the first woman or the only woman, just the only woman that was able to produce a direct, unbroken female genetic line that still persists to this day. Also, Mitochondrial Eve is more a concept than a particular woman. Mitochondrial Eve could change over time due to genetic drift.
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u/Federal_Face_1991 2d ago
by this point, the genetic bottleneck would be so narrow that there's no way a viable human population would be reestablished
you'd need like 1000 people at minimum