I googled the amount of people that lived on earth throughout its entire history, it’s roughly 108 billions. If I take 1 person and multiply by 2 for each generation of ancestors, at the 37th generation it already outnumbers that 108 billions. (it’s 137 billions). If we take 20 years for 1 generation, it’s only 740 years by the 37th generation.
How??
(I suck at math, I recounted it like 20 times, got that 137 billions at 37th, 38th and 39th generation, so forgive me if it’s not actually at 37th, but it’s still no more than 800 years back in history)
In: 1391
Aside from mathematic principals, and the Kissing Cousins point that keeps coming up, I think you’re also forgetting that Genghis Khan, *one person* that lived almost a thousand years ago, still has ~16,000,000 living male descendants with his Y Chromosome.
Assuming that every descendant is coming from a unique pair of individuals is part of the problem. If you have a single individual procreating with multiple unique partners (like, say, a conquering warlord that razed every village he came to and took any woman he wanted as his concubine) you’ll wind up with an inverted funnel where dozens of generations wind up funneling back to one person.
Latest Answers