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The Shallow Roots of the Human Family Tree
An anonymous reader writes to mention an AP story about research discussing the relatively recent origins of every human on earth. Despite the age of our species, every human on earth can trace their ancestry back to someone who may have lived as recently as the Golden Age of Greece (around 500 BC). From the article: "It is human nature to wonder about our ancestors -- who they were, where they lived, what they were like. People trace their genealogy, collect antiques and visit historical sites hoping to capture just a glimpse of those who came before, to locate themselves in the sweep of history and position themselves in the web of human existence. But few people realize just how intricately that web connects them not just to people living on the planet today, but to everyone who ever lived."
You might be able to trace your geneology, but the process assumes that all your ancestors were entirely forthcoming when it came to their nuptial reltaions. Makes you wonder why children take the male's family name?
May the Maths Be with you!
I've never been able to trace back any further than 1650 or so. Not that I've tried all that hard - it's at that point where I have to leave the US and travel to England to find more, and that's way beyond my budget. My ancestor arrived in the US not only broke, but in debt - he had to pay for his passage with several years of indentured servitude. Not much has changed...
Lost: Sig, white with black letters. No collar. Reward if found!
What population? The were white settlers hunted the Tasmanians down like animals, then herded the last few survivors to a Christian-themed labor camp on a desert island where they succumbed to starvation and disease. The last pure-blooded Tasmanian died in 1876. Her skeleton was put on display in the Tasmanian Museum (as an example of "primitive human") and was finally cremated, over the museum's vehement objections, in 1976.
here's the beginning, taken from:
... as if her regal bearing and fierce eyes somehow "ennobled" me and all her descendants ... as if the "character" of the entire species, our potential for virtue, somehow depended on having at least one ancestor who could have starred in a Leni Riefenstahl documentary.
g an.htm
http://www.fictionwise.com/ebooks/eBook918.htm
With hindsight, I can date the beginning of my involvement in the Ancestor Wars precisely: Saturday, June 2, 2007. That was the night Lena dragged me along to the Children of Eve to be mitotyped. We'd been out to dinner, it was almost midnight, but the sequencing bureau was open 24 hours.
"Don't you want to discover your place in the human family?" she asked, fixing her green eyes on me, smiling but earnest. "Don't you want to find out exactly where you belong on the Great Tree?"
The honest answer would have been: What sane person could possibly care? We'd only known each other for five or six weeks, though; I wasn't yet comfortable enough with our relationship to be so blunt.
"It's very late," I said cautiously. "And you know I have to work tomorrow." I was still fighting my way up through post-doctoral qualifications in physics, supporting myself by tutoring undergraduates and doing all the tedious menial tasks which tenured academics demanded of their slaves. Lena was a communications engineer--and at 25, the same age as I was, she'd had real paid jobs for almost four years.
"You always have to work. Come on, Paul! It'll take fifteen minutes."
Arguing the point would have taken twice as long. So I told myself that it could do no harm, and I followed her north through the gleaming city streets.
It was a mild winter night; the rain had stopped, the air was still. The Children owned a sleek, imposing building in the heart of Sydney, prime real estate, an ostentatious display of the movement's wealth. ONE WORLD, ONE FAMILY proclaimed the luminous sign above the entrance. There were bureaus in over a hundred cities (although Eve took on various "culturally appropriate" names in different places, from Sakti in parts of India, to Ele'ele in Samoa) and I'd heard that the Children were working on street-corner vending-machine sequencers, to recruit members even more widely.
In the foyer, a holographic bust of Mitochondrial Eve herself, mounted on a marble pedestal, gazed proudly over our heads. The artist had rendered our hypothetical ten-thousand-times-great grandmother as a strikingly beautiful woman. A subjective judgment, certainly--but her lean, symmetrical features, her radiant health, her purposeful stare, didn't really strike me as amenable to subtleties of interpretation. The esthetic buttons being pushed were labeled, unmistakably: warrior, queen, goddess. And I had to admit that I felt a certain bizarre, involuntary swelling of pride at the sight of her
Well worth reading, along with the rest of the stories in the collection "Luminous" by Greg Egan. here's another link to some favourable reviews of his stuff: http://www-users.cs.york.ac.uk/susan/sf/books/e/e
A way to visualize what he is saying would be to take two overlapping cones/triangles, one with the point aiming up, one with the point aiming down, like a star-of-david, or an angular hourglass.
The cone with the point at the top represents one person (A, for ancestor) who lived X years ago and their descendants. The cone with the point at the bottom represents one person (D for descendant) who lives today and their ancestors. Any overlap is where A and D share mutual ancestors/descendants.
Using this representation, the argument here is that there exists (erm, existed) a person A, for whom every human who is alive today falls into their descendancy cone. Or more importantly, they assert that this is inevitable, and sufficient time has passed such that it has already happened. The key, according to this visual model, is that "now" is below the line where the two cones cross.
- RG>
Hey pal, this isn't a pleasantforest, so don't waste my time with pleasantries!
I disagree with you that matriarchial societies are rare. In my country (India) matriarchial families (where women held positions of power) are not uncommon. They have been even more common in the past. Example is the Maratha Confederacy
a r.jpg
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Maratha_Confederacy
which, while founded by Shivaji Raje Bhonsle (a man) was really run by his mother, Jijabai
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jijabai
As well as the reigning queen of Jhansi, Laxmibai
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Laxmibai
http://www.copsey-family.org/~allenc/lakshmibai/
in the 19th Century.
Matriarchial societies were aggressively discouraged by muslim rulers after they invaded and occupied large parts of India, since, according to Islamic Kanoon-e-Shariat, a woman can't take a dump without the husband's permission. Despite that, the Mameluk dynasty of the Delhi Sultanate was briefly inherited by a woman, Sultana Razia al-Din (Jalalat ud-Din Raziya), daughter of Shams-ud-Din Iltutmish (India's first and last black emperor).
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Razia_Sultan
Of course, the mad mullahs got their undies in a twist over that, but she did rule for 4 significant years in the Sultanate.
There is a strong matriarchial tendency in many Maratha clans in India to this day. Maratha women are aggressive and outgoing (more so than other Indian women). They bunch up their saris , wrap them around around their legs and wrap the tail over the backside and tuck it uder the small of their backs, making them more like trousers.
http://www.maharashtratourism.net/images/women-we
This way, their movements are less restrictive. They can run, walk long distances, balance themselves better while carrying heavy loads, and engage in physical labour like their male counterparts. They are addresses as 'Bai' (meaning Lady) in public, they fish, farm, sell stuff, all that. Maratha women often contribute more to the family income than Maratha men.
South Indian families (even Brahmin ones) often have the mother as the key decision-maker in the family (since males are busy working or studying) and thus has de-facto authority in family matters, even over the husband. This was true of my own grandmother, for instance (I'm Bengali), where my mother was one of 7 children, and my grandmother coached them in homework, got them to do chores, decided which schools they'd go to and so on, while my grandfather was busy at work (sometimes away from home for weeks). That's a matriarchial family right there.
If you define power roles by the breadwinner, then these families are not all matriarchial, but that's a pretty narrow criterion in my opinion. The real power of authority is in the hands of the decision maker, which, in these cases, is the female, not the male.
Plus, many South Indian Hindu Brahmins don't adopt their father's names as family names. They adopt the names of the town/village where their family originated (similar to some Arabs that way). They keep fairly detailed records of their lineage, and not much patriarchial bias exists in that process.
l'Homme n'est Rien l'Oeuvre Tout: Gustave Flaubert to George Sand
The math only works if you assume that the ancestry never coincides with itself until it is mathematically impossible for it not to do so. This is ludicrous. Ancestry will coincide many, many times before that point. It is easy to demonstrate mathematically that it is more than possible for an ancestry to fold in on itself repeatedly, without touching other distinct lines.
The basic assumption (flawed), is that having trillions of "ancestors" means that it fold in across the entire spectrum of living people at a given time, when it can in fact fold in multiple times on a selection of that population; or that having any particular person as your ancestor is almost precisely as likely as any other arbitrary person. Historically, there are many social constrictions to make such statistics highly unlikely.
It also seems obvious to me, that were interracial marriages so common place so long ago (across the last few thousand years, even), the world would not be quite as genetically diverse a place as it currently is.
Disclaimer: IANAM(athematician). However, I do love math, and this seems like a fairly obvious and very easily provable flaw. I'm also probably misusing the phrase "fold in" above, though: but I imagine everyone can understand what I mean by that.