You know one of my hobbies is genealogy. And you’ve heard the 6 Degrees of Separation theory. Well, I have one for you.
You are one. Your parents are 2. Your grandparents are 4 in number. Your great-grandparents are 8. You have 16 great-great (or 2nd-great) grandparents. You have 32 third-great-grandparents. And 64 fourth-great grandparents.
Certain observations follow from this. First, it’d be hard to get you and all your relatives into the same room.
Second, if you’ve ever thought about trying to do a genealogy, it’s a pretty broad target. Your chances of being related to somebody who left records is fairly high.
The tenth-greats carry you into the 1600’s. And it’s sometimes possible to find connections all the way back to the 30th-greats. When you reach the 34th-greats, your number of active grandparents of that generation exceeds the current population of Earth.
Somewhere back there, there’s got to be some duplication, eh? So we’re sharing people.
By the time you reach the 70th generation, you’ve hit the BC/AD divide. And the number of grandparents you have by the 70th generation…I haven’t calculated. But it’s got to be considerable. You’re probably related not only to the whole Roman Empire, but to the whole planet, in one degree or another, especially since the world population was considerably smaller then.
Good morning, world. 🙂
Kind of makes you know how much it’s taken the world to produce you, doesn’t it?
Does this mean I’m not unique? If there’s a chance of any duplication, even though the odds are astronomical, who’s to say? More ancestors than the number of grains of sand on all the beaches of Earth, or more than the number of stars in the Milky Way.
As Ray Thomas of the Moody Blues put it, “Don’t you feel small? It happens to us all.”
On the other hand, out of 64 chromosomes, and a general shakeup, plus the usual small mutations, you’re still a snowflake: one in crom-many billion.
EDIT: yep, Joe caught me in that one: 46 chromosomes.
That’s a very interesting thought. And when you think about it, although the population was considerably smaller hundreds of years ago, the world was still larger. It took considerable time to get from one place to another — so you had ethnic groups that bore very similar characteristics.
Fast forward another 500 years or so, I think the human race will not have the same ethinic distinctions as we see today. You could have people with the last names of Chan, Rafferty, or Rosales having very similar features with little or physical features of the ethnic origins of their surnames.
Don’t know if I’m making much sense here, but it’s very interesting to speculate.
Of course, if you buy into the whole convergence theory, we all share the same great*grandparent as of 140,000 years ago at the most. Hiya, cousin!
We’ve got ancestors in our tree who are listed in the Doomsday Book, which, when we found out, was kind of neat. And, to put it politely, some of my distant relative were colonists down-under. 🙂
Waves from the frozen north, hi, Cous!
My not-so-distant relative was also a colonist down-under. Great Grandfather Henry, to be precise, went through all of his teenage years and then some in Van Diemen’s Land.
If all men are brothers . . .
Would you let your sister marry one?
Think of the world as of 1000 AD—which is about 30 generations back. Since our number of living grandparents at that time is exceeding the population of the planet, we have got to be sharing a lot of ancestors. A LOT of ancestors…particularly since the world of that day is divvied up into inaccessible pockets in which immediate neighbors can interact, as, for instance, Europe with the Middle East and Eastern Russia, but not with Africa or the Far East or the Americas, and North American with South America, but not much else. Australia pretty much on its own with the adjacent isles. India acting as middle ground between the Far East and the Middle East, but not with, say, Korea, which was involved in a tussle regarding the northern Far East. And numerous other pockets, none of which interacted except with closest neighbors.
Take Europe for an example: take England. People didn’t move much. The gentry might marry somebody from out of the shire, but mostly neighbors married neighbors for hundreds of years. The lines become more than related: they’re braided. It drives you nuts trying to sort out which William Smith we’re talking about, i, ii, or iii. Or is it Smythe, Smiton, etc, all of whom are also related, except the Smiths of Nether Wallop, who are a different batch (occupational name).
This means the lines have been back and forth dozens of times. And by thirty generations, you are very likely related to everybody in your shire, possibly everybody in your end of England; and very possibly to half of France and Norway, too. What keeps you from exceeding the population of Earth is that the whole shire is wearing different hats for different people, and being 3rd great grandfather to bunches and bunches and bunches.
The same story, second verse, in every other pocket in the world. Genetic togetherness. Once the world opened up with the voyages of Cooke, da Gama, et al, we began sharing genes like mad—but not just in the Americas, but all around the world; and districts that had long been moderately in contact (due to nice chaps like Atilla and Alexander, and such) all of a sudden are trading populations in large doses. It’s just kind of interesting. I didn’t know I’ve got such a dose of Norwegian. Never had suspected it. But yep. Italian. Didn’t suspect that either. Just kind of rearranges who you think you are. I’ve got a lot of bits and bobs of genetics from all over.
I’m half German, a quarter Hungarian, and the rest is Heinz 57. 😀
DH’s family is listed in the Domesday Booke, but we have relatives as far afield as HI and NZ.
“We’re mutts! Check it out — his nose is cold!”
I think that’s called “pedigree collapse.”
Have I dragged Alex Shoumatoff’s book The Mountain of Names in here yet?
Um, pardon, but 1600 isn’t one of the choices: 4096, I believe.
N "greats" 2^N (2 x 2 x 2 ,,, B times)
1 (parents) 2
2 (g.parents) 4
3 1 8
4 2 16
5 3 32
6 4 64
7 5 128
8 6 256
9 7 512
10 8 1024
11 9 2048
12 10 4096
13 11 8192
14 12 16,384
15 13 32,768
16 14 65,536
...
(I’ve spent way too much time around computers!)
No, no, 😉 the sixteen hundreds, as in the date! But I’m fascinated by your little program. Quantities have always perplexed me…distances, for some reason, nbd, but quantities and my brain do not play well together, not even in the kitchen.
Me mum told me I would throw terrible tantrums trying to fit the big box into the littler box. I had a wooden mallet, and would try everything to make it go.
Cut out for astrophysics, maybe…
Oops! Never mind. 🙂
Program? I don’t need no stinking program! Sadly, I have these memorized due to extreme over-use.
Astrophysics? Maybe Quantum Mechanics? 😉
Well, so much for the code HTML tag! The font changes, but no fixing the spacing.
My pedigree starts collapsing with my parents (they share a set of great-grandparents), and that’s not the only place where it shrinks. On the other hand, I keep finding cousins who married other cousins, or ancestors of in-laws, which makes it all one tree.
1, 2, 4, 8, 14, 28, um, I need a bigger chart and there’s two more collapses right about there ….
(It’s mostly online at Rootsweb, for the insanely curious. You can look for ‘root person’.)
Oh, quite a few apples in my family did not fall far enough from the tree. One line in particularly married cousins all up and down the line. Tracing them is a headache!
Being so inter-related was apparently useful in the past. I’ve heard of Amazon tribes which are very hostile to strangers, so the first that happens when they meet a stranger is that you go through your respective lineages. If you can figure out that your great-great-great-grandmother’s second cousin twice removed is the other person’s uncle’s sister-in-law’s nephew’s great-great-great aunt, you are related, and don’t have to attack each other. If there is no relationship, you are automatically enemies.
The Greeks did that too. But they went it a little further. If you gave or accepted hospitality, you created an eternal bond between your house and their house, so you had to recite not only your lineage, but your guest-friendships unto the umpteenth generation. It was very bad juju to harm a guest.
Doors weren’t generally locked. If you woke up and found somebody sitting at your hearthfire, that’s half the guest-friendship job. But if you offer bread and water, you’re hooked, so you’d better exchange genealogies before you feed him, in case there’s a bloodfeud somewhere in there.
If there should be such a feud, which makes it obligatory to kill this person, you have to politely escort him with all his possessions to the boundary of your land and give him a good running start (beyond thrown spear range) before you can chase him.
From one of the numerically obsessive: for your 70th generation back, CJ, two to the 70th is 1.18E21. To go Sagan on you, I guess that’d be 1200 billion billion. 😉
I think that means that somewhere back there we have a lot of ancestors doing double-duty for a lot of other people.
Grains of sand, eh?
SO my 70th-great-grandparents have to belong to everybody from Europe and Western Russia.
Of course, since some of those older folk tended to have serial marriages and 20 kids—including the women—that number inflates fast. I don’t know if there’s anyone in Europe who ISN’T related to Gonnor de Crepon.
Good point, Jcrow9! Two to the tenth is about 1000 (1024), so 20 is about 1,000,000 and 30 is about 1,000,000,000 or one billion. Thirty generations is around 600 years, 1400s, when the world population was less than a billion.
Of course, that doesn’t mean you’re related to everyone in the world, but I’m definitely related to everyone in Europe, and given Mongols passing through and the interaction chain, Europe to the Mideast to Egypt to the rest of Africa, I’m probably related to a large proportion of people in Asia and Africa, just going back those 600 years.
May I step back just a minute for your reply to my post? Unless they’ve found more, I recall being taught that humans have 46 chromosomes. not 64. Perhaps genetics is progressing like nuclear physics by discovering more and more elements?
I have mixed heritage of French, English, German, Scottish, Irish (I think), and Native American. I’m 57 years old, so you can just call me “Heinz”. 😀
It’s been WAAAY too many years. doh! You’re right! Have I ever mentioned I’m numerically dyslexic? I do this with phone numbers, too, even trying to carry the number mentally between the phone book and the dial buttons. 😆 It drove me crazy in math classes!
I know I am!
lessee…
I’m English(Anglo-Saxon AND Norman,)Scots, Irish, Welsh, Dutch, German, Belgian, French, Native American,Italian, Norwegian, Spanish, White Russian, Polish, Goth (Visigoth AND Ostrogoth) and Vandal. (Yes, Osric,first you loot, then you burn…)
English, Irish, Scotish, Welsh and Jersey
English,Irish,Scots,Welsh,French,Norwegian and native american is my mix.Oh and Cherry on my mothers side.They are Okies too.My wife is from the Philippines so my kids have a much wider gene pool than myself.
If it’s a Cherry from Oklahoma we’re possibly related in some degree: my grandfather was one of a dozen kids in a family that came out of Texas and into Indian Territory running cattle, well before the land Run; many of them have descendants in Oklahoma. There’s one other branch in Oklahoma that is from before my great-grandfather: allegedly the family went separate ways at a river crossing, in a quarrel that nobody of the modern generation remotely remembers.
I’m a bit more boring, as far back as I know. But I am never sure how to describe my ancestry. I’m Swedish, English, and then I have ancestors from Alsace-Lorraine and Danzig, when both were under Prussian control. They are now French and Polish, but my ancestors were Prussians, which I guess would map more closely to Germany now. So I never know what to put for that part.
Heh. If dealing with ancestry, you call it what it was called at the time your ancestors were there, which is why I can talk about being Goth and not Macedonian or Albanian.