On the basis of these data, they assumed the ancient model of and estimated both a recent epoch of exponential growth and the population size before growth, pointing to growth starting 3.5 (2.9–4.1) kya at a rate of 3.4% (2.4–5.1%) per generation, resulting at 0.65 (0.30–2.87) millions individuals today (Figure 1b and Table 2).