Article 6T9PW Why Families That Go Back Many Generations Have Far Fewer Ancestors Than They Expected

Why Families That Go Back Many Generations Have Far Fewer Ancestors Than They Expected

by
Lori Dorn
from Laughing Squid on (#6T9PW)
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Cameron Duke of MinuteEarth explained The Ancestor Paradox, a simple genealogical term that states that while a family may go back many generations, some of their forbearers may have been related to one another, thus reducing the limbs on a family tree.

To make sense of this, let's say for example,I dunno, that your parents are first cousins....Thatwould mean that two of your grandparents aresiblings.Since siblings have the same parents,and therefore the same ancestry, a bunch of theseancestors are duplicates; we can really just countthem once. Going back to our 37 generations thing,that's more than 34 BILLION ancestors we wouldno longer be counting!

This is due to inbreeding, which was very common in certain eras due to small communities, pedigree maintenance, and kissing cousins". This led to a reduction of ancestry or pedigree collapse, as the shared ancestors could only be counted once.

And our family histories are full of lots and lots of inbreeding. That might sound prettygross to you and me, but mating with relatives hasn't always been frowned upon - heck, Albert Einstein married his first cousin.And certainroyal families actively encouraged inbreeding. But the biggest reason for all this inbreeding is that, throughout most of human history,we lived in small groups with limited babymaking options...

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