NERD SCIENCE STATISTICS:
I Can't help myself.
The world population in the year 1500 is estimated to be about four hundred and fifty million (450,000,000) people.
If you start counting all your direct ancestry - exponentially: two grandparents; four great grand parents; eight great-great grand parents; sixteen g-g-g grandparents etc. the number of your ancestors exceeds the population of the Earth about the year 1450 (around 1450 you exceed five hundred million direct ancestors.) After that, by following reverse population growth your ancestry begins to collapse toward an original Eve; or Australopithecus Africanus: an original Lucy to be more exact.
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| Lucy and Luke - the alpha ancestors. |
Note: no apple trees and snakes - just reverse evolution.
the Ol'Buzzard
You forgot the fig leaves. Ultimately, we are all Africans and Lucy's got some 'splainin' to do.
ReplyDeleteWell I guess I am a Monkey's Uncle! ha ha ha
ReplyDeleteI recall reading somewhere that at one point there was an extinction event that almost wiped out humans. IIRC, something like 100,000 years ago there were only a few thousand homo sapiens alive. It's the main reason there's surprisingly little genetic diversity across human populations. It all goes back to Africa, and a lot more recently than Lucy.
ReplyDeleteIf I were more ambitious, I'd Google the question and find some specific citations. I'm probably remembering a National Geographic article -- they've published a lot of articles on human evolution.
We all trace back to Mitochondrial Eve and Y-chromosome Adam who may never have met but lived maybe 100,000 to 150,000 years ago, as Nan said. Every other line has died out.
ReplyDeleteIf you do start tracing back, as you say, multiple generations, you will find a great many common ancestors in the chain as second, third, fourth and fifth cousins marry etc. Not inbreeding per se but a lot of line breeding.