If you go back 40 generations how many ancestors will you have?

[Dante]

Question: If you go back 40 generations (which is about 1,000 years), how many ancestors will you have?

Was viewing this:

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and the question was raised in this context...

from the audience: "My question is, what does our ancestry tell us about ourselves as individuals?"

and it was answered.

"The short answer is...it really depends what you mean by ancestors, because our ancestors, the further back you go in time, effectively involves everyone on Earth. The way our family trees spread out from us is that everyone in history has had two parents."

Then there was a joke that I found to be funny, but what I found to be hilarious was how most everybody laughed a nervous laugh. What this showed me was how juvenile we still, are as a culture and a species.

the joke will follow...

 

[Dante]

"If you go back, say, 40 generations, which is about 1,000 years, then you'll have 1 trillion ancestors, which is 10 times more than the number of humans that have ever existed"



"The fact is that your genetic relatedness with your actual ancestors drops off a cliff after a few generations. DNA is incredibly good at identifying first-degree relatives, brothers and sisters and parents and first cousins. But the fact of the matter is, because of the way families work, because of the way genealogy works, pretty much everyone in this room is a fifth cousin or a sixth cousin or something like that."

re: Dante used to post "We are all Dante." and most everybody failed to get "IT"

 

[Dante]

The Joke:

"It really depends what you mean by ancestors, because our ancestors, the further back you go in time, effectively involves everyone on Earth. The way our family trees spread out from us is that everyone in history has had two parents. That's a fairly standard fact, possible exception of Jesus."

 

[Dante]

14:46
Our next question is about how our ancestors spread around the world.

How do we study migration?

My question is, how can the study of ancient DNA help us understand the environmental and climatic factors that influence the migration patterns of early humans? And are there any significant shifts in these patterns that could have been significant in human history?

Yeah, I think the best example I think we know of, that I would say, is about 10,000 years ago, the last ice age ended really, at least the climate became much warmer. And what happened in our part of the world is that people started using, or our corner of the world in the Near East, people started using agriculture, farming, having animals. And that spread across Europe, all the way to remote, sort of peripheral places like Britain, rolling the tape forward about 5,000 years to, for example, the sort of people that built Stonehenge or started building Stonehenge. They would trace about 80% of their ancestry to the Near East. And that's something we can only know, it's an interesting sort of thing about history, we can only know it by studying ancient DNA and studying ancestors.

 

[frigidweirdo]

Question: If you go back 40 generations (which is about 1,000 years), how many ancestors will you have?

Was viewing this:

.



and the question was raised in this context...

from the audience: "My question is, what does our ancestry tell us about ourselves as individuals?"

and it was answered.

"The short answer is...it really depends what you mean by ancestors, because our ancestors, the further back you go in time, effectively involves everyone on Earth. The way our family trees spread out from us is that everyone in history has had two parents."

Then there was a joke that I found to be funny, but what I found to be hilarious was how most everybody laughed a nervous laugh. What this showed me was how juvenile we still, are as a culture and a species.

the joke will follow...

The problem with this is that one person could be various different ancestors.

Because the problem goes that the further you go back, the more people there, to the point that 2,000 years ago, you have more ancestors than were alive at the time.

 

[Dante]

The problem with this is that one person could be various different ancestors.

Because the problem goes that the further you go back, the more people there, to the point that 2,000 years ago, you have more ancestors than were alive at the time.

I believe that is what one of the experts was saying

 

[zaangalewa]

I believe that is what one of the experts was saying

I'm no expert in population dynamics but I think you are not able to solve this problem without to know very concrete the history of your family. Evolution creates not only trees (you call it "bloodlines" in your language what's a little strange because 'blood' had in former times also the meanings 'spirit' and 'tradition'). But evolution also creates confluences.

In case we think Adam and Eve had been the first human beings then you married for example a grandgrandgrand...daughter of Eve or you did not marry at all. This would be a confluence. But you don't know what had happened between this two points. The first homo erectus lived about 2 million years ago and I heard the eldest campfire we found is about 1.5 million years old - so I think the homo erectus used "since ever" fire. All later human races had the ability to have children with each other - so they all are only variations of the homo erectus. When we count 25 years per generation then this would be 80,000 generations. The 2^80,000 number of ancestors is a damn big number.

On the other side we know for example that about 70,000 years ago less than 1000 individuals existed who are the only ancestors of the whole mankind now. Sounds not many - indeed all mankind nearly died out this days although they had been as intelligent as we are - but it also could be now in this 2800 generations later 7.655...e+842 descendents. ... Let us populate the universe - is the universe big enough for such an extraordinary high number of human beings?

 

[Dante]

I'm no expert in population dynamics but I think you are not able to solve this problem without to know very concrete the history of your family. Evolution creates not only trees (you call it "bloodlines" in your language what's a little strange because 'blood' had in former times also the meanings 'spirit' and 'tradition'). But evolution also creates confluences.

In case we think Adam and Eve had been the first human beings then you married for example a grandgrandgrand...daughter of Eve or you did not marry at all. This would be a confluence. But you don't know what had happened between this two points. The first homo erectus lived about 2 million years ago and I heard the eldest campfire we found is about 1.5 million years old - so I think the homo erectus used "since ever" fire. All later human races had the ability to have children with each other - so they all are only variations of the homo erectus. When we count 25 years per generation then this would be 80,000 generations. The 2^80,000 number of ancestors is a damn big number.

On the other side we know for example that about 70,000 years ago less than 1000 individuals existed who are the only ancestors of the whole mankind now. Sounds not many - indeed all mankind nearly died out this days although they had been as intelligent as we are - but it also could be now in this 2800 generations later 7.655...e+842 descendents. ... Let us populate the universe - is the universe big enough for such an extraordinary high number of human beings?

Adam and Eve as a story is fiction

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