What a weird article! It reads like it contains made-up information, or as if someone completely garbled the correct information. For example:
We expected that the genetic diversity of this population of mouflons would be very homogeneous, and that this genetic diversity would decline over time. Instead, we observed the opposite.
Genetic diversity cannot decline when you start from a single pair. With sexual species, a single pair is as low in diversity as you can get without going extinct. Diversity can only increase through mutation, so since mutational effects are generally minimal over short time periods one would not think that diversity could possibly increase. The article appears to be based upon this technical paper:
Unexpected heterozygosity in an island mouflon population founded by a single pair of individuals
What's missing is a clear definition of their use of the word "diversity." When starting from a single pair there cannot be more than 4 alleles per gene. Since they don't believe that mutation or infusion of new genes from the outside are factors, there can still be only 4 alleles per gene. By this measure diversity cannot have increased at all.
But they're not measuring diversity this way. By heterozygosity they mean that alleles of genes and of interdependent groups of genes are combining in increasingly novel ways. It must be these permutational combinations that they're using as their measure of diversity.
What this means for Noah's ark is that single pairs could give rise to viable populations (the individuals should probably be as distantly related as possible), but genetic measures of diversity would still reveal that there were only 4 alleles max per gene. This is not what we see today.
--Percy