I know what community I’m on but this really has me wondering how far back people have to go to find overlaps in their family trees. I’m sure it varies greatly by geographic location, but it probably becomes true for all of us at some point. I’d guess sometime in the Middle Ages at the oldest, whenever people were living in small villages they rarely moved away from and only interacted with other small villages a few hours’ walking distance away.
Inbreeding generally stops being a notable factor around 4th degree relation between parents. Even first cousins, 3rd degree relatives, only have about a 6% risk of an anomaly at birth when having a child together, compared to the 3% normal rate for all pregnancies. There’s likely been a LOT of inbreeding in any one person’s family history.
The nice thing is that once a new non-relative is added to the mix, the risks associated with past inbreeding largely go away; you only pass on 1 copy of your genes to your kid, so even if you’re personally affected by a family history of inbreeding giving you a bunch of identical copies, if your kid’s other parent isn’t related to you, their copies should be different from yours, and the kid will have 2 different copies just like anyone else, helping protect them from recessive familial conditions and the like.
Yeah, but on the other hand if you have a sibling - by this logic - it would be counted as another 4096 additional “past people” but it isn’t. And because in the past families were quite larger, having 10-15 kids, I wonder how much finding and substracting those doubles would shrink the “billion trillion” ancestors number
But that math equation (doubling every time) is just for one person to exist. It’s not making any assumptions about shared ancestry or the current population vs the ancestry population
If you go back far enough it would require like a billion people thousands of years ago when there weren’t that many people alive. I’m confused now
I know what community I’m on but this really has me wondering how far back people have to go to find overlaps in their family trees. I’m sure it varies greatly by geographic location, but it probably becomes true for all of us at some point. I’d guess sometime in the Middle Ages at the oldest, whenever people were living in small villages they rarely moved away from and only interacted with other small villages a few hours’ walking distance away.
Inbreeding generally stops being a notable factor around 4th degree relation between parents. Even first cousins, 3rd degree relatives, only have about a 6% risk of an anomaly at birth when having a child together, compared to the 3% normal rate for all pregnancies. There’s likely been a LOT of inbreeding in any one person’s family history.
The nice thing is that once a new non-relative is added to the mix, the risks associated with past inbreeding largely go away; you only pass on 1 copy of your genes to your kid, so even if you’re personally affected by a family history of inbreeding giving you a bunch of identical copies, if your kid’s other parent isn’t related to you, their copies should be different from yours, and the kid will have 2 different copies just like anyone else, helping protect them from recessive familial conditions and the like.
Yeah, but on the other hand if you have a sibling - by this logic - it would be counted as another 4096 additional “past people” but it isn’t. And because in the past families were quite larger, having 10-15 kids, I wonder how much finding and substracting those doubles would shrink the “billion trillion” ancestors number
But that math equation (doubling every time) is just for one person to exist. It’s not making any assumptions about shared ancestry or the current population vs the ancestry population