DNA traced back 9,000 Years - Relative Alive & Well Today

[AsleepInYorkshire]

I found this absolutely amazing and thought some of you may to.

AiY(D)

[Rhyd6]

I have a vague recolection of something similar on Time Team. I think they actually excavated the skeleton and had a facial reconstruction done and someone recognised it as looking like someone local. Not too sure if this was so or if it's a false memory. Fascinating stuff though, give Who Do You Think You Are a run for its money.

R6

[Hallucigenia]

Only people who don't understand maths should be surprised by this.

In 2013 Ralph and Coop showed that just about every European who was alive 1500 years ago, is an ancestor of pretty much every person of European descent today, it's just a product of finite populations meeting the power of compounding. You have 2 parents, 4 grandparents, 8 great-grandparents etc - well if you go back ~300 generations over 9000 years, then a "unique" family tree would require 2x10^90 members which is the number of atoms in the entire universe - and 100,000,000 universes just like it.

[UncleEbenezer]

Only people who don't understand maths should be surprised by this.

In 2013 Ralph and Coop showed that just about every European who was alive 1500 years ago, is an ancestor of pretty much every person of European descent today,

1500 years ago, infant and childhood mortality would have ensured that rather a high proportion of Europeans alive at any particular point in time would not survive to breed.

And "of European descent" is perhaps telling, too. Tribal boundaries aren't always delimited by skin colour.

[mc2fool]

I found this absolutely amazing and thought some of you may to.

AiY(D)

Ahh, yup, I did indeed ... when it was first published 25 years ago....

[Hallucigenia]

1500 years ago, infant and childhood mortality would have ensured that rather a high proportion of Europeans alive at any particular point in time would not survive to breed.

And "of European descent" is perhaps telling, too. Tribal boundaries aren't always delimited by skin colour.

The nature of these things is that you can't distinguish between a lump of DNA that came from this exact individual and his sister who had 10 kids that all survived to breed.

And I didn't say anything about skin colour, I merely meant European in a geographical sense.