I Googled My Mother’s Maiden Name and Found My Family’s Violent Secret

Re:I Googled My Mother’s Maiden Name and Found My Family’s V... by tomkwok on Saturday April 11, 2015 @01:10AM (#9358590)

There was inevitable inbreeding between ancestors too.

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Re:I Googled My Mother’s Maiden Name and Found My Family’s V... by jacobolus on Saturday April 11, 2015 @02:02AM (#9358688)

The way you phrased that shows some bias toward contemporary European family structures.

Inbreeding was standard accepted practice pretty much everywhere until 1500 years ago, and still is in many parts of the world. (In many Arab countries, for example, marriages between first cousins make up 15+% of all marriages, and marriages between first or second cousins make up 30+% of all marriages.)

It’s especially in Western Europe where cousin marriages out to 2nd, 3rd, or further cousins were taboo, and universal “outbreeding” was/is the enforced norm. (Primarily because the Catholic church wanted to break the political power of extended families, and divert more inheritances to the church instead of to people’s kin. In similar vein they discouraged/disallowed divorce, adoptions, marriage of widows, etc.) I did a google search to look for quick sources just now. This page has a summary: http://www.collective-action.info/_DEB_MAP_RelationMarriageP...

[ Parent | on HN ]

Re:I Googled My Mother’s Maiden Name and Found My Family’s V... by tomkwok on Saturday April 11, 2015 @02:51AM (#9358771)

I'm sorry for the confusion. I just thought when the human population was still small long ago, when there wasn't even a concept of 'incest', inbreeding between ancestors was more common and expected. So we all descended from incestors in today's context. Is that right?

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Re:I Googled My Mother’s Maiden Name and Found My Family’s V... by jacobolus on Saturday April 11, 2015 @02:55AM (#9358781)

Yep. If you go back 10–20 generations in anyone’s family tree, you’ll find we’re all the product of sexual relationships between first cousins, siblings, parents and their children, etc.

[ Parent | on HN ]

[dead]

Re:I Googled My Mother’s Maiden Name and Found My Family’s V... by wrongc0ntinent on Saturday April 11, 2015 @02:32AM (#9358740)

Charles Darwin (pretty intelligent European) married his first cousin.

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Re:I Googled My Mother’s Maiden Name and Found My Family’s V... by peterfirefly on Saturday April 11, 2015 @02:58AM (#9358784)

He did. And we have lines of inbred mice we use for experiments. That doesn't change the fact that inbreeding tends to be bad.

(And Arabs /are/ by and large less intelligent than Europeans. That's quite unfortunate for them, for the Arab countries, and -- given the current migration patterns -- for the Europeans. Inbreeding is one of the preventable reasons for their general lower intelligence. Infectious diseases is another. Lack of certain micronutrients a third. The latter two are fixed by moving to Europe, the former not so much.)

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Re:I Googled My Mother’s Maiden Name and Found My Family’s V... by bitserf on Saturday April 11, 2015 @01:55AM (#9358675)

Did the DNA test through 23andme.com, some interesting East Asian and African skeletons were discovered for a family supposedly of purely European lineage :)

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Re:I Googled My Mother’s Maiden Name and Found My Family’s V... by bdowling on Saturday April 11, 2015 @02:21AM (#9358727)

I don't think you should read too much into a statistical matching of your DNA markers with statistical samplings of populations in which individual samples also vary widely. It's the modern version of those occupational survey systems (Kuder?) that really just tell you what population your answers are most similar to, with very little useful insight.

[ Parent | on HN ]