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A comment on Humans are more closely related than we commonly think. Parent comment

Re:Humans are more closely related than we commonly think by JPLeRouzic on Tuesday October 06, 2020 @02:49AM (#24695295)
The point in the article is that at many generations ago, we are heavily inbred, it is not that we are all related.

If you look at one generation ago one have 2 * 2 ^ 0 ancestors, at two generations, one have 2 * 2 ^ 1 ancestors, etc. At 27 generations one apparently has more ancestors than people in the world at that time. This apparent paradox stems from the fact that we are heavily inbred.

Thus the article is correct.

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Re:Humans are more closely related than we commonly think by jerzyt on Tuesday October 06, 2020 @04:21AM (#24695703)
> The point in the article is that at many generations ago, we are heavily inbred, it is not that we are all related.

I'm not following your point - maybe it's just a linguistic thing. To me, inbreeding implies relation, at least blood-relation, even when there was no other relation, e.g. conquering armies raping and pillaging.

No argument with your math.

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Re:Humans are more closely related than we commonly think by andi999 on Tuesday October 06, 2020 @04:46AM (#24695833)
There might have been multiple separated inbreeding groups. Yes these groups are related among themselves but not inter-group.
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Re:Humans are more closely related than we commonly think by zuminator on Tuesday October 06, 2020 @06:55AM (#24696428)
The article is saying that every person bears some relation to each other, even among distant groups. No further back than 3500 years ago existed a person who was a common ancestor to every currently living human being.
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Re:Humans are more closely related than we commonly think by danaris on Tuesday October 06, 2020 @08:47AM (#24697113)
Nnnno; 3500 years ago, there were already clearly-separated groups of humans on different continents.

Perhaps you're off by a 0 or two...?

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Re:Humans are more closely related than we commonly think by TheCoelacanth on Tuesday October 06, 2020 @09:16AM (#24697339)
No, there were fuzzily-separated groups of humans on different continents. There was still some interbreeding across continents.

The Americas may have been clearly separated for a while, but they have done so much interbreeding with people from other continents since 1492, that the common ancestor is more recent than that.

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Re:Humans are more closely related than we commonly think by danaris on Tuesday October 06, 2020 @10:56PM (#24704895)
I guess that depends much on whether the claim is that literally every human can draw ancestry back to this common pair, or merely the vast majority, because I'm fairly sure there are still "uncontacted" indigenous peoples in the Americas...
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Re:Humans are more closely related than we commonly think by pepy on Tuesday October 06, 2020 @08:14AM (#24696869)
Noah, that you? :D
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Re:Humans are more closely related than we commonly think by xbmcuser on Tuesday October 06, 2020 @07:14AM (#24696538)
3500 or 35000?
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Re:Humans are more closely related than we commonly think by pegasus on Tuesday October 06, 2020 @08:35AM (#24697028)
3500 sounds about right, if we consider only Eurasia. Otherwise, it could be farther back, but possibly not that much further, according to the wikipedia entry for Mitochondiral Eve (look for "most recent common ancestor"):

"Monte Carlo simulations suggest the MRCA was born surprisingly recently, perhaps even within the last 5,000 years, even for people born on different continents."

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Re:Humans are more closely related than we commonly think by oblio on Tuesday October 06, 2020 @05:22AM (#24696003)
It would be interesting to find out the degree to which inbreeding went down in modern days. The downside of modern life is that traditional families are being torn apart but this might be an evolutionary advantage since it means that the gene pool gets a lot more mixed since I imagine inbreeding is probably much lower in cities due to much broader selection pool.
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