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."

Comments

Family Tree Grafting

[ObsessiveMathsFreak]

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?

Re:Family Tree Grafting

[Peyna]

Makes you wonder why children take the male's family name

A: You live in a patrilineal society.

Not everyone has live or currently does live in such a society. Arguably, matrilinealization is the more intuitive method, becase you can be pretty certain who is the mother of the child.

Re:Family Tree Grafting

[netsharc]

If you go x generations back, there are 2^x "ancestors" (1 generation before you: 2^1 = 2 parents, etc). If we go back 5000 years then you have, hmm how many generations? Let's say 200 generations. 2^200 = 1.6 x 10^60, but there weren't that many humans back then. So it seems their research have concluded that a lot of people have a common ancestor. Is it in-breeding? Well, sort of. Going the other way, if you have 2 kids, and they have 2, etc, etc, you will have 2^x grand(-grand)*-kids that after e.g. 20 generations, a million people will be there, and it's hard to believe that two people will know that they are related to each other through you.

Fun to think about..

Re:Family Tree Grafting

[Tatarize]

In a couple decades somebody is going to start a great project to just check people's DNA and plug them into a world family tree. The Y and mitochrondial dna would be great, we could probably trace anybody right to their family. Similar things are being done between species where DNA tests are providing actual relationships between animals as such. Someday we will be able to find a DNA sample and even if it's not in the database we will be able to find out exactly who his parents are.

Re:Family Tree Grafting

[gEvil (beta)]

In a couple decades somebody is going to start a great project to just check people's DNA and plug them into a world family tree.

You mean like this?

Re:Family Tree Grafting

[wfberg]

In a couple decades somebody is going to start a great project to just check people's DNA and plug them into a world family tree. The Y and mitochrondial dna would be great, we could probably trace anybody right to their family. Similar things are being done between species where DNA tests are providing actual relationships between animals as such.

The entirety of the population of Iceland has been DNA-sampled and indexed according to their lineage. DNA studies are already used to determine how populations moved and intermixed in the past, on a population-wide scale (where a few people from a population are sampled, rather than everyone).

There even a (if somewhat shaky) DNA test to determine racial descent. I saw it on a TV show once, where they had some school kids find out they had DNA from basically another race. I.e. a black guy turned out to have some asian genes, a white girl with blonde hair turned out to have some black genes etc. Possibly a bullshit test, possibly not.

Re:Family Tree Grafting

[forkazoo]

But while we're on the subject, I do wonder why a woman asserting her independence by refusing to take her husband's name when getting married feels perfectly comfortable carrying her father's name. According to the Wikipedia article, the practice is generally in decline, but for those of us old enough to remember the shrill "I'm no one's property" arguments before the notion became politically correct and commonplace, the irony lingers. Even funnier if you've been through divorce court.

I have always expected that there would be a movement where a man and woman get married and pick a new family name. It just seemed logical to me. Neither party has to take the other's name, and they also get to share a common family name which would symbolise the bond. Hasn't happened yet, but I still figure it might. Especially if gay marriage takes off. Then, how do you decide who's name to take? Flip a coin?

Re:Family Tree Grafting

[Bing Tsher E]

Yes, hyphenated names are a good way of insuring that a woman bears both her husband's and her father's name.

I've never understood why anybody of a 'feminist' bent would consider that a good thing.

Re:Family Tree Grafting

[radtea]

The test is probably real, it's just that there isn't really set "race genes."

That's because "race" is far more of a social phenomenon than a biological phenomenon, and the obsession with defining or determining which race a person belongs to is something that does not stem from anything other than politics and sociology. It is a question that no biologist would ever think to ask, because race is not a useful or interesting biological category. There are two reasons for this.

The first is that few if any racial characteristics show any significant discontinuity in the population at large--the lightest-skinned "black" person is lighter than the darkest-skinned "white" person. Without such discontinuities the idea of race becomes entirely arbitrary, based on a line drawn for purely political purposes.

The second is that insofar as there are relatively-disconnected pools of genes in the human population, they are small and don't last very long because of our aggressive pursuit of exogamy (breeding outside our kin-group). Most primate species practice inbreeding more than outbreeding. In humans it is rather the opposite. In simple terms, most of us are of mixed race. This is especially true of North Americans with regard to mixing of blacks and whites, for well-known reasons.

Anyone who believes that "racial purity" is either possible or desirable is merely proclaiming their ignorance of human biology.

Re:Family Tree Grafting

[Anonymous Coward]

If you go x generations back, there are 2^x "ancestors" (1 generation before you: 2^1 = 2 parents, etc).

Not down South.

Re:Family Tree Grafting

[forand]

The problem with your idea of 1.6e60 people in the past is that you are over counting. Sure I have that many possible combinations but in the end there is only one line that made me. I find it is easier to think of it in the future instead of the past, i.e.: if I have 2 kids and all my later relatives have 2 kids then my genetic input to the species will grow by powers of 2 per generation. However at each point someone else is also inputing genetic info so at each point I have to take out a factor of two for the total of the planet, which is why, if we all only had 2 kids we would never have a growing population and everyone would be related to everyone else rather quickly, which is what they found. Now I am babbling. . . .

Re:Family Tree Grafting

[lightning_queen]

Although there is no gene/set of genes that determine "race" because it is a social concept, the term is most likely used when a certain combination of genes that is prevalent in a "race" is found in a person. Take, for example, an Asian person. Usually, the first things that come to mind at the term "Asian" is the almond-shaped eyes, straight black hair, "yellow" skin color, and perhaps skeletal structure (size, build, etc). If a person visibly possesses these characteristics, they are deemed to be Asian or of Asian decent. Although someone may not show it visibly, biologists could conclude that someone is of Asian decent because they possess the genes that could have given them these characteristics.

The thing is, race isn't just skin color, which both you and the replier to your original post seem to have neglected. Many features, or ranges of features define a race. Among those features are usually skeletal structure (again, size, build, etc, and also things like the shape of the skull), skin color (melonen content, levels of certain colors to make the apparant color), eye color, and hair color and texture (this is neglecting biological phenomina, such as albinism, in which case you could say that the lightest "black" person is lighter than the lightest "white" person, but these tests could also be useful to determine if you are a carrier of such recessive genes). A person's genes determine all of this, and it does so with so many different factors (I think there's something like 7 different genes that determine eye color) that it could actually make it easier to do some sort of lineage trace. We already have the human genome mapped, so it's not that much of a stretch to be able to trace back at least as far back as we can get DNA samples. Whether they've actually done it as stated in some of the links posted here is a different story, but it's definitely feasible.

It would be interesting to see, too. Maybe have an option to send a sample of blood to somewhere like National Geographic when you donate blood and a couple weeks later, you get the "results" of it: a breakdown of your DNA, basically (and in Laman's terms, of course), including genetic suseptibilities to various diseases or allergies or whatnot, and perhaps a way to track your lineage using your "profile" (much like they seem to already do on the National Geographic website). It would be beneficial, in my opinion at least, to know some of the possible genetic disorders you are at risk for passing down and it would definitely be interesting to find out who your ancestors are and where they came from. And beyond a personal level, it could also be useful in finding out when and how the different "races" came about. Everyone knows the general where and why of it (dark skin typically means tropical or sub-tropical regions and acts as natural sunblock, etc), but not necessarily the how and when (what caused the skull/skeletal structure to change in people of this region and not of that one?), especially if we all share a common ancestor.

It'd be a huge project to undertake to be able to get enough people for it to be really accurate, but it'd be fun to watch it expand and see it unfold and become more and more accurate and more and more enlightening.

Re:Family Tree Grafting

[elronxenu]

The article fails to consider the Australian Aborigines, who crossed into Australia via a land bridge from Asia around 40,000 - 50,000 years ago.

It's an interesting mathematical trick, but their result is so obviously empirically false, so I doubt their research even after excluding the Aborigines and other populations known to have been isolated from the rest of the world for many thousands of years.

Re:Family Tree Grafting

[Dionysus]

the childrens last name is a combination of the parents name.

same in the Vietnamese culture. Children take both their parents name. Married people don't take their partner's name.
Their children take the father's last name for the combination.

So, say father Huynh, mother Vo.
Children would have the last name Huynh Vo.
Say, children marries someone whose father and mother were Nguyen and Quan respectivelly, then their children would have the last name Huynh Nguyen.

This practice has gone out of use though, especially for people who grew up in the Western world (most of the people I know living in the US or Europe basically decided on a family name, like Huynh, and kept it "simple")

Re:Family Tree Grafting

[dasunt]

I prefer hyphenated names, myself. It would get unwieldy to write them all out after a few generations, but it would be a cool way to have your entire family tree represented in your name.

There's an easy solution. Assume that Mrs. Smith marries Mr. Jones. They take the family name Jones-Smith. Their daughters, upon marrying, drop "Jones" (the father's name). Their sons, upon marrying, drop "Smith" (the mother's name). So if Ms. Jones-Smith marries Mr. Jefferson-Clark, they couple takes the name Jefferson-Smith. A person would then share a name with their father, grandfather, great-grandfather, etc, as well as their mother, grandmother, great-grandmother, etc. Slightly modified, same-sex couples could use a similar system. However, there's still a problem with polyamorous couples...

Re:Family Tree Grafting

[Cyryathorn]

"Arguably, matrilinealization is the more intuitive method, becase you can be pretty certain who is the mother of the child."

... which is a good reason why family names get passed down patrilinearly! It gives the dad a stake in the life of the child, and it gives the child a claim on a particular father (even if it's the wrong one, biologically speaking).

Re:Family Tree Grafting

[jc42]

From the Nat'l Geographic FAQ:

9. What tests do you perform?
We will be performing ONE OF two tests for each public participant.

Males: Y-DNA test. This test helps us to identify deep ancestral geographic origins on the direct paternal line.

Females: Mitochondrial DNA (mtDNA). This tests the mtDNA of females to help identify the ancestral migratory origins of your direct maternal line.

So they will ignore all of the autosomes, and test only the tiny Y chromosome for males. Their results will only tell you about your purely paternal line (if you're male) or your purely maternal line (if you're female).

My parents didn't talk about the family tree much, but I already know a lot more than what this study would tell me. Thus, being male, they won't tell me anything about either of my grandmothers, who both spoke French (from Quebec and France).

I wonder if I'm the only one who finds this a major disappointment. They could be extracting a lot more information from the DNA of the participants by looking for markers in the other 99% of their DNA.

Re:Family Tree Grafting

[jc42]

There's an easy solution. Assume that Mrs. Smith marries Mr. Jones. They take the family name Jones-Smith. Their daughters, upon marrying, drop "Jones" (the father's name). Their sons, upon marrying, drop "Smith" (the mother's name). So if Ms. Jones-Smith marries Mr. Jefferson-Clark, they couple takes the name Jefferson-Smith. A person would then share a name with their father, grandfather, great-grandfather, etc, as well as their mother, grandmother, great-grandmother, etc.

You've described the essence of the traditional naming scheme in Iberia (Spain, Portugal). There's inconsistency about whether the paternal name comes first or last. The upper classes often preserve more than just two names, and sometimes tack on "de" and a place name. Most people just use two family names, though, which probably saves them a lot of writing over a lifetime.

Of course, in most of Europe, family names often only go back a century or two, before which people had just a given name that could be augmented by a profession or place of origin or a descriptive term. Or just "'s son", which is often specific enough in a typical village. In Iceland, they still don't use family names, just patronymics.

I know a number of people from Scandinavia who have a specific last name because their parents or grandparents bought a farm, and they adopted the farm's name (whose origin is often lost to history).

A similar thing was done by the UK's royal family. They adopted the family name Windsor in 1917 to dissociate themselves from their German ancestors. They were at war with Germany, and wanted to sound English. Windsor was, of course, the name of one of their castles. A quick google for "Windsor royal family name" gets nearly 3 million hits, so you can easily read lots of takes on this particular family name.

My favorite name from my family tree is Cameron, which is a simplified spelling of a Scots Gaelic phrase meaning "broken nose". It seems there was this particularly belligerent fellow who was a clan leader, and a lot of his relatives decided to adopt that insult as their name, as a way of thumbing their noses at the taunters.

Re:Family Tree Grafting

[The Nordic Beast]

The article fails to consider the Australian Aborigines, who crossed into Australia via a land bridge from Asia around 40,000 - 50,000 years ago. It's an interesting mathematical trick, but their result is so obviously empirically false, so I doubt their research even after excluding the Aborigines and other populations known to have been isolated from the rest of the world for many thousands of years. The parent gets the time period for the arrival of Aborigines in Australia correct, but is incorrect in asserting that they walked there over a land bridge. A no time during hominid history would you have been able to walk to Australia. The deep water trench between Bali and Lombock and between Borneo and Sulawesi (the so-called Wallace Line) marks fartherest you could have walked from Asia. Given there's generally been deep water between Timor and the rest of the eastern Indonesia archepelago and between Timor and Australia, the original Aborginies probably had to make three pretty sizeable water-borne leaps at a long before there is any archelogical evidence anywhere that people are using boats. This makes the mere existence of Aborigines in the Australia for that length of time is pretty astounding.

Re:Family Tree Grafting

[jc42]

I have always expected that there would be a movement where a man and woman get married and pick a new family name.

I know a number of couples who have done this. Actually, in each case they combined their original names in some clever way to make a combinatin that they liked.

I've heard a number of lawyers explain that in all US states except Louisianna, the laws about names go back to English Common Law, where the rule was that you can use any name you like, as long as it isn't fraudulent. You can't pick a famous name and pretend to be that person, and you can't change your name to escape debts or prosecution. But if your name change (as in a marriage) is published in the official records, that constitutes public notice and you can't be charged with fraud after the change is officially published. They usually say this to explain why there's no legal problem with a woman keeping her original name after marriage. But I've also heard this used to explain why a couple that makes up a new family name and writes it on their marriage registration is fully within their rights, regardless of what ideas others may have on such things. And, historically speaking, neither practice is especially new or unusual in the English-speaking parts of the world.

Funny story: One such couple is two women who recently married here in Massachusetts, where it has been legal for a few years (and so far it hasn't destroyed any mixed-sex marriages that anyone knows of, even if a lot of men think they're both very attractive women ;-). They recently renewed their passports, and sent in requests for a name change to their new combined last name. One was accepted (because they are legally married), one was rejected (because US federal law doesn't recognize same-sex marriage). Two different bureaucrats, two different decisions in exactly the same case.

Of course, having a different name on your passport and other ids isn't at all unusual. Newly-married women routinely find themselves in this situation, and it doesn't seriously interfere with travelling. This couple mostly think it's funny. "Guess what those idiots in the passport office just did."

What I'm looking forward to is the fun of watching US law adapt to the slowly-growing Muslim population. I can see a couple going off to Morrocco or Indonesia on vacation and coming home with a new wife in the family. I wouldn't be surprised if this has happened already, but they kept it quiet and didn't try to get official papers changed. But it's just a matter of time, and it'll be fun to follow the outrage and consternation from the bigot crowd, while the lawyers calmly ask what laws have been broken ...

Re:Family Tree Grafting

[plunge]

Um, what the heck are you talking about? I'm not an expert in transplantation, but I'm familiar enough to know that what you're saying sounds like complete BS: a person's race is neither predictive nor particularly significant compared to all the other important factors. You're talking as if race were more important than blood type, which is pure crazytalk. I don't know what doctors told you this, but it sounds more like you heard what you wanted to hear.

Differences in race are both fairly minor AND have more variance than they do absolute differences. Lactose tolerance is a particularly goofy example, because it's both such a minor difference AND still not as universal as you make it out. Not all Asians are lactose intolerant, and not all people from Wales aren't. There is no medical feature that's both universal to and unique to any "racial" group.

I knew that racism was still a major cultural problem in China, but this takes the cake.

Re:Family Tree Grafting

[ShanghaiBill]

The article fails to consider the Australian Aborigines,

The aborigines were not genetically isolated. Australia was visited by Indonesians at least 4000 years ago. We know this because that is when dingoes (dogs) arrived in Australia.

Re:Family Tree Grafting

[lahvak]

I don't know much about transplants, but as far as your milk example goes, I am not sure it has anything to do with race. My wife, who is Chinese, drinks milk very often, and does not seem to have any trouble with it. I, on the other hand, don't like milk, I don't like the taste of it, and I suspect it makes me slightly sick, even though I drink it so rarely that I am not really able to tell. My mother, who is from central Europe, all her ancestors were born in central Europe, and is blond with blue eyes, cannot digest milk, and it makes her violently ill.

Re:Family Tree Grafting

[Richard Kirk]

Various other people have come up with arguments saying that Australia was not isolated. They well may be right. However, Australian aboriginies were the example I first thought about in connection with this.

We know, or we believe we know from genetical studies, that populations do migrate or diffuse out rapidly. Often this motion is along trade routes, or around shallow coasts; following animal migrations, rivers, or belts of arable land. As long as there are suitable links, then there will be patches of people with a common relation. In medieval times, Indian objects got to Scandinavia, and Roman glass fot to Japan. But we also know there are places like Australia which took a long time to be discovered by Europeans (they somehow managed to find Tasmania first, but miss Australia), and so are probably much more weakly connected with the rest of the world. There are also other cultural barriers that will attenuate if not prevent intercourse between races, countries, religions, tribes, and whatever. Genetic research has told us that these taboos have probably been breached throughout history, but nevertheless there will be resistance.

We do not know nearly enough about where people did and did not travel in early history to make such a model. A lot of the evidence from 5000BC has probably vanished with rising sea levels. My gut feeling is that this model makes the world too uniform, and does not have enough hard links to it, but I don't really know either.

Re:Family Tree Grafting

[Tatarize]

>>Although there is no gene/set of genes that determine "race" because it is a social concept, the term is most likely used when a certain combination of genes that is prevalent in a "race" is found in a person.

The point is that there is no gene or set of genes which determines race. Rather there are frequencies of genes which differ by region. In the tropic areas darker skin is more common, this is not to suggest there is a gene or gene set is unique to any group. Certainly there are probably a number of people commonly thought of as white who have a functional gene for skin melanin, just as the other allele is very likely present within other populations.

The point is, within the gene pool the divisions of "race" are artificial. Subsets of genes within a certain range are not a valid basis for anything. This is the reason the test cited by the above post is due to fail, because you can't mark any gene as being restricted to any one "race".

Genetically we are not white, black, asian, mexican, hawaiian, german, dutch, danish, irish, middle eastern, or jewish... we are human. The only time race matters is when people think that race matters.

You can however, very accurately trace lineage with genetics. Given the Y chromosomes of every man on the planet you could track down anybody's family and how related they are to any other man. Given mitochrondrial DNA you could do the same for the maternal line. Given all the genes as a whole and all the junk DNA in them, you could track down anybody and exactly how they fit into global family tree. We could trace down each individual gene to it's source and assemble an amazingly complete ancestor list (nameless ofcourse) in the process.

Genes are very very real, races on the other hand are pretty much nonsense.

Re:Family Tree Grafting

[jackbird]

And it's illegal in all 50 states. Yes, Utah too. In fact, it's in the Utah constitution:

Article 3 Section 1 -- The following ordinance shall be irrevocable without the consent of the United States and the people of this State:
First: -- Perfect toleration of religious sentiment is guaranteed. No inhabitant of this State shall ever be molested in person or property on account of his or her mode of religious worship; but polygamous or plural marriages are forever prohibited.

Certain local law enforcement may look the other way, however.

The GP's larger argument that objection to bigamy is bigotry is fatally flawed, however, and implicitly accepts the thesis of the "same-sex marriage will lead to people marrying animals" crowd. Over the course of the 20th century, marriage evolved from a property transaction, where ownership of a woman (who could not vote or own property in many places) was transferred from one family to another, into a partnership between two individuals with equal rights under the law. Gender is currently entirely irrelevant to the social and legal purposes of marriage (tax and probate implications, hospital visitation rights, parental rights, right not to testify against one's spouse, etc.). Allowing more than two people to marry, on the other hand throws a wrench into all the modern purposes of marriage (e.g. all members of a criminal conspiracy could marry each other to avoid being testified against).

Except for isolated populations

[IvyKing]

Example: the native population of Tasmania, which had been isolated for 10,000 years - although there might not be any "pure" Tasmanian people left.

Other than that, the artocle does make sense.

Er, what?

[Aladrin]

Relatively recent origins? You mean, like, everyone on Earth today was born within the last 125 years? Duh!

Oh, you mean ancestry... Yeah, every dates back to the monkey-that-wasn't-a-monkey having babies. Duh.

More recent than that?

OH! Maybe you mean: Everyone is connected by a common ancestor a LOT more recently than people think is possible!

Maybe you just should have said that.

Not me

[bsartist]

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...

Re:Not me

[m0nstr42]

Same here, it seems if ye do try to track them in England, ye can't because so many Americans' ancestors were weirdos who didn't register their babies with the Church of England.

But if they left because of debt (referring to the parent), then maybe you can find records relating to the debt that may point to another source which would have genealogically-useful information? The church is pretty good at keeping records, and so are people who are owed significant amounts of money :) Just a thought, I am not a genealogist.

Re:Not me

[MMC Monster]

You only had one ancester in the 1600s?

Maybe you had some others that you haven't found out about yet. :-)

futurama...

[m1ndrape]

I'm my own grandfather...

What native Tasmanian population?

[tetromino]

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.

Re:What native Tasmanian population?

[cammoblammo]

Truganini was the last Tasmanian.

This one really gets Native Tasmanians going. True, there don't seem to be any left of non-mixed descent, but horny white sealers made damned sure the race didn't die out completely. There are still quite a few Tasmanian Aborigines in Tasmania today, and they get really upset when they get told they don't exist.

A good argument for matrilinealism!

Re:What native Tasmanian population?

[xerxesdaphat]

Um. Ok, next time you're in Australia, for anybody on Slashdot, don't go waving around that name (Keith Windschuttle). He's a highly controversial revisionist historian... along the lines of a Holocaust denier, really. He can say all he likes, really, I have no problem with people saying what they like, but he does say a lot of stupid mixed-up things.
                I'm sure the politically-correct loonies in the 60s did go a bit overboard from time to time, but Windschuttle goes as far as implying the so-called `Stolen Generation' never took place, and Australia's well documented period of government policy against non-whites (`White Australia Policy') was falsified and exaggerated. He's a parochial, white, right, conservative tosspot of the type that Australia is unfortunately too full of, and a good example of why I got fed up and went home to Auckland where people of all races manage to live quite nicely alongside one another without lynchings or race-riots.

-Tommi =^_^=

Easy to forget

[quokkapox]

If you don't explicitly document your ancestry, you'll forget it. There are things my parents don't know which my remaining grandparent has long since forgotten. We have family pictures of people we don't know anymore.

The fact is, we live in the present, and that's what is important. I couldn't care less if your great-great-grandmother was the queen of spain, or if your grandfather's second cousin's dad was a slave. That needn't have any effect on how I interact with you.

Re:Easy to forget

[rinkjustice]

Knowing your past helps understand who you are, and what you'll likely be up against in the future. If, by chance, you suffer from a particular disease or disorder, it's important to know what side of the family you inherited that genetic malady from, and how seriously it affected those ancestors. It helps you feel less weird and alone, and if your ancestors lived to a ripe old age, then that should give you hope for the future.

It's also "a good thing"TM not to be forgotten forever in time. Your ancestors may have lived intersting lives and have interesting stories to tell. They were likey good people who don't deserve to be sloughed off into distant and lost memory.

Greg Egan wrote a good short story on this in 1995

[Anonymous Coward]

here's the beginning, taken from:
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 ... 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.

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/eg an.htm

Christians claim to be children of Abraham?

[ems2]

It means when Muslims, Jews or Christians claim to be children of Abraham, they are all bound to be right.

I know Jews and some Muslims claim to be children of Abraham but I never heard of a group of Christians claiming to be children of Abraham.

Re:Christians claim to be children of Abraham?

[Planesdragon]

I never heard of a group of Christians claiming to be children of Abraham.

There ARE hebrew and arabic Chirstians, you know.

In a way, it's too bad that Mohammad wasn't around when Christ was walking the holy land. If the Prophet of Islam had met Christ, they would probably have formed one relgion instead of two.

Re:Christians claim to be children of Abraham?

[mypalmike]

This is a song we sang at a Catholic church when I was a kid:

Father Abraham had many sons
And many sons had Father Abraham
I am one of them
And so are you
So let's all praise the Lord.
Right Arm, Left Arm... (There was some weird "hokey pokey"ish dance aspect to it.)

Re:Christians claim to be children of Abraham?

[mortonda]

In a way, it's too bad that Mohammad wasn't around when Christ was walking the holy land. If the Prophet of Islam had met Christ, they would probably have formed one relgion instead of two.

Excuse me? The two religions are not compatible. The only way I can make your statement work is if the "Prophet of Islam" became a Christian.

Re:Christians claim to be children of Abraham?

[otterpop81]

"... it is not the natural children who are God's children, but it is the children of the promise who are regarded as Abraham's offspring." - Romans 9:8

Not the acutal decendents of Abraham, but the "Spiritual" children of Abraham.

Re:Christians claim to be children of Abraham?

[Triv]

(There was some weird "hokey pokey"ish dance aspect to it.)

He lets the righteous in,
He kicks the heathens out,
He lets the righteous in, and he plops 'em on a cloud
We do the hokey-pokey to prove we're all devout,
That's what God's all about.

--Triv

Re:Christians claim to be children of Abraham?

[Jeff DeMaagd]

That was never intended to be a genetic claim but a spiritual one. Think of it something like adoption.

Re:Christians claim to be children of Abraham?

[Khomar]

Never fear. Had the Prophet met Christ, there would only be one of those religions around today -- that whose leader wasn't killed in the ensuing war.

I found your comment somewhat comical considering that Jesus did die. Not from a war, but because he allowed the leaders of his day capture and crucify him. He then rose from the dead which marked the beginning of Christianity. Given his teaching, the Christians would not have been the ones fighting the war.

If the proposed situation did occur, the muslims would have probably attacked the Christians (just as the Romans did), but the Christian church has always grown the fastest when it has been under the greatest persecution. Net result: the large Christian church you see today. Just because one side can kill better than the other does not mean that the more peaceful side will not win in the end.*

* Admittedly, many people have used the name of Christ to justify their wars (just as people always some kind of justification for what they want to do that is wrong), but I think you would find that very rarely was it truly done in the name of Christ and in keeping with His teachings.

Re:Christians claim to be children of Abraham?

[radtea]

Just because one side can kill better than the other does not mean that the more peaceful side will not win in the end.

The Gnostics might disagree with you there. Early Christianity, which took on recognizable form some decades after Jesus' death, had a variety of factions. Some were more peaceful than others. The most violent, autocratic and centralized one prevailed through the use of armed force.

Christianity became a successful religion only because of its follower's willingness to use violence to capture, torture and kill their opponents. By infiltrating the halls of power and gaining influence over the secular means of repression they were able to extend their reach even further.

Buddhism, in contrast, is a genuinely peaceful religion, and has never succeeded in displacing Hinduism.

In either case, if Mohammed and Jesus had met each other they would almost certainly have hated each other. The world only has room for so many charismatic megalomaniacs at once. Furthermore, comparing Jesus and Mohammed isn't really fair: comparing Paul and Mohammed would be closer. They both founded universal, evangelical religions. Jesus saw himself as a Jewish prophet of a Jewish god to the Jewish people, which is no surprise because that's what he was.

Re:Christians claim to be children of Abraham?

[rp]

Read about the Crusades, in which "noble" men came to the holy land to massacre people and honestly believed that every kill was an act of redemption (as I happened to read earlier today).

The Christian church usually grows fastest when backed by those in power, e.g. when important leaders convert to Christianity (emperor Constantine, Chlodwig of France, etc.), or when Christian invaders enslave (Africa), suppress (Latin America) or annihilate (Northern America) the non-Christian population.

It's all well to take Jesus as an example, but you can't generalize from his life to how Christianity fares in general.

Re:Christians claim to be children of Abraham?

[CosmeticLobotamy]

Of course, at some point, it still boils down to Faith.

Fair 'nough.

Re:Christians claim to be children of Abraham?

[LordLucless]

Read up on the history of the Crusades, and you'll find a different picture. Yes, some of the crusaders thought they were doing the right thing. Most were doing it because crusaders got benefits in this world (like indulgences for any sin committed while crusading). But beyong the actual crusaders, look at the people who actually called the crusades. They were all called for political reasons, not theological. The important thing to remember when considering the Roman Catholic Church, particularly during the time of the Holy Roman Empire, is that it is not a religious body, it is a religious body and a political one, possibly the most powerful political body of its time.

As the original poster said, many use Jesus' name to support their agendas, but their agendas rarely follow his teaching (see also the England/Ireland dispute; a political sovereignty dispute that many people now use as an example of how religion causes nothing but trouble).

Re:Christians claim to be children of Abraham?

[LordLucless]

Christianity became a successful religion only because of its follower's willingness to use violence to capture, torture and kill their opponents. By infiltrating the halls of power and gaining influence over the secular means of repression they were able to extend their reach even further.

You have it around the wrong way. Christianity in general spread first to a region, then ambitious political men rode it to try and achieve their own agendas. Trying to force religion on a population against their will is an act of futility. Most of the violence you're talking about (the notable incidents are the various crusades and the Spanish inquisition) were fueled by politics, with a Christian sugar-coating to stop people complaining about them.

Also, assuming the current records of Jesus' words are reasonably accurate (and if you have any that are more accurate I'd like to know) it's certain that he did not see himself as a prophet to the Jewish people. In Matthew, for instance, in what is known as the Great Commission, Jesus tells his disciples "therefore go and make disciples of all nations". His dealings with other people (say, the Samaritan woman at the well) also make it clear that his message is not exlusively for Jews, although his personal ministry was generally in Israel, and hence, he had a largely Jewish audience.

Re:Christians claim to be children of Abraham?

[Triv]

oh. my. god. Or rather, apparently, yours.

It was a joke. It was funny. I dare you to find a situation where god leading a spectacular, heavenly rendition of the Hokey Pokey ISN'T funny.

Chill, dude. Seriously. You're gonna give yourself an aneurism if you're not careful.

Triv

Re:Christians claim to be children of Abraham?

[Xenographic]

> Buddhism, in contrast, is a genuinely peaceful religion, and has never succeeded in displacing Hinduism.

I take it you've never heard of the Sohei ...

Re:Christians claim to be children of Abraham?

[the_womble]

Christianity became a successful religion only because of its follower's willingness to use violence to capture, torture and kill their opponents

Christianity had already spread through the Roman Empire before Constantine's conversion.

Buddhism, in contrast, is a genuinely peaceful religion

Really? Buddhists ahve historically fought holy wars, and persecuted other religions (for example Japanese Christians were forced into hiding.

Even now arson attacks on churches are frequent in Sri Lanka.

Mohammed and Jesus had met each other they would almost certainly have hated each other

Jesus fairly consistently preached against hating anyone - even when Jewish tradition permitted it.

The start of a long road

[99luftballon]

Given the worldwide geographical spread of Homo sapiens it's a believable number. As recently as 75,000 years ago we lost around two thirds of the population in the Lake Toba eruption and there have been a fair few fluctuations since then.

The stuff later in the article is interesting. One question it raises is the effect of the increases in travel will have on the genetic mix. Traditionally the vast majority of the population married someone within a small radius of their initial home. As larger numbers of people move further away there could be some interesting effects.

Re:The start of a long road

[El Torico]

500 BC vs. 73,000 BC? That's a very big difference, and I'm inclined to believe the latter number. The article gives ranges; one is a very wide range of 5000 BC to 1 AD. However, the article is too vague to find out what rates of migration were used and why they were used. It would be interesting to see if actual historical migrations were used. There are a lot of other variables that need to be taken into account.

Also, how well does this match up with the "genetic drift model"? The numbers don't agree, so further refinement is necessary.

Based on another article on this, http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2004/09/04093 0122428.htm, it appears that the point isn't "All of us have one common ancestor in the collective sense, but that any two of us, regardless of distance, have a common ancestor who lived at about that time." That's just the way I interpret it.

Re:The start of a long road

[Mr. Underbridge]

The problem is, they start with a set of mathematical assumptions and then do calculations and get this result. As with most purely computational studies that get outlandish results, I'm more likely to question the assumptions than believe the result. And I say this as someone who works with a lot of stats and probabality in my profession, and having made the same mistakes. The thing is, like all theorists, having made the prediction they need to find genetic evidence to back it up. Unfortunately, they're not going to find it.

The studies I've seen that actually studied genetic evidence give a figure closer to 10s of thousands of years.. There's no way it's as short as the 2000 years they claim, just based on common sense - look at the different peoples in different regions - they most certainly *don't* share the same gene pool. Also, there are multiple versions of the Y chromosome floating around that don't converge that recently.

The Genographic Project is currently estimating 60K years for the "Genographic Adam" from whom everyone on earth is dsecended, not 2K. I think you may be correct on the interpretation of "any two people are connected by some common ancestor 2000-5000 years ago," which is just a modification of the Kevin Bacon game. It's not the same as "everyone is descended from some common person 2000-5000 years ago - and from the interpretation in the /. article, that's definitely what they mean. And it's dead wrong.

Re:The start of a long road

[tfried]

The assumptions may or may not be valid. However it's important to note that genetic inheritance != ancestry, and this does not necessarily have to match up with genetic data at all.

Consider two fully isolated populations A and B. At T(100 generations ago) a single individual M migrates from A to B, and causes offspring with someone from B. No further migration takes place ever until the present day. Would you expect to be able to show this genetically? Hardly. Only 1/1^100 of M's DNA would have been passed on to any single individual living in B today(*). That's absolutely nothing at all. The genetic heritage would be entirely dissolved for all purpuses of measuring much earlier than that.

In contrast, ancestry is defined to always be handed down 1:1. M would almost certainly be 100% ancestor to each an every individual living in B today. M's parents would almost certainly be 100% ancestors to the entirety of both A and B (assuming they had at least one more child that stayed in A).

Genetic models reaching this far back are not concerned about individuals at all. Using genetic data, you may be able to show there was a substantial amount of migration between two populations. Single individuals just don't give an impact, genetically. The article uses an entirely different approach, and - importantly - an entirely different concept of inheritance: family trees, not genetics.

Note the article does not just look out for the one common person. It says, every single person living in that timeframe (unless their family tree died out) would be an ancestor to every single person living today. Mind-boggling, but not entirely unreasonable once you realize it's not genetics they are talking about.

(*) Unless of course that person carried some particular gene, which happened to be extremely valuable for living in B, and got an evolutionary advantage. But that's an entirely different story.

Beatifully Ambiguous Writing

[SpectreHiro]

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)

Well damn, I can trace my ancestry to someone much more recent than that. To boot, I'm pretty sure we all have ancestors that lived during 500 BC... I dare you to find me someone who lacks a living ancestor during anytime past the origin of life on earth and before their own time. I frickin' dare you.

Ohhhhhh... They mean to say that everyone can trace their ancestry back to a single person who lived during the Golden Age of Greece. That guy must've been a stud.

Re:Beatifully Ambiguous Writing

[tricorn]

If you have any children, chances are so did your parents.

Impressive

[DuckWizard]

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)

This fellow must have been quite busy with the ladies.

Re:Eww yuck!

[kimvette]

No it wouldn't. Despite the wealth of information available today, racists will consider people with different color skin or slightly differently shaped eyes to be less than human. There is no rationale behind it whatsoever and having a pedigree to show that say, (for the most common example) a white supremacist and Martin Luther King Jr. share common ancestors 60 or so generations back would not change their attitudes.

Additional Startling Implication: Genetic Disease

[reporter]

That the human population is descended from a tiny group of people has another, more deadly, implication, according to "New Scientist". The relative inbreeding increased our susceptibility to genetic disease.

The "New York Times" gives a detailed analysis of genetic disease in Saudia Arabia, where more than 50% of marriages are ones between blood relatives.

Curiously, the nature of genetic disease suggests that if you want to ensure the survival of your descendants into the eons upon eons, you should marry outside of your ethnic group. The offspring of an Eskimo-African couple will typically have a stronger set of genes than the offspring of an Eskimo-Eskimo couple, a German-German couple, or a Vietnamese-Vietnamese couple.

Re:Eww yuck!

[bsartist]

Or am I related to Kevin Bacon?

Well I'll be damned - that game really does work. Five steps from me to Kevin Bacon:

1. My niece is Angel Boris
2. ... who appeared in Dragon Storm with John Rhys-Davies
3. ... who appeared in The Great White Hype with Samuel L. Jackson
4. ... who appeared in Sphere with Dustin Hoffman
5. ... who appeared in Sleepers with Kevin Bacon.

Re:Additional Startling Implication: Genetic Disea

[Anonymous Coward]

Curiously, the nature of genetic disease suggests that if you want to ensure the survival of your descendants into the eons upon eons, you should marry outside of your ethnic group. The offspring of an Eskimo-African couple will typically have a stronger set of genes than the offspring of an Eskimo-Eskimo couple, a German-German couple, or a Vietnamese-Vietnamese couple.

That is patently false. Humans, before we had modern technology that allowed us to travel great distances in short periods of time, had very little contact outside of our own tribes. To put, humans lived within their own tribes for hundreds of thousands of years.

Mixing does not create a "stronger" result. If anything, it creates a weaker result, depending on how different the two parents are. Why do you think the traits of various ethnic groups were selected? Do you think they are randomly arranged? No, they were selected based on adaptations to the environment of that group of people. Mixing in differnet traits that do not fit well into that environment will result in those traits being removed.

Re:Eww yuck!

[bsartist]

There is no rationale behind it whatsoever and having a pedigree to show that say, (for the most common example) a white supremacist and Martin Luther King Jr. share common ancestors 60 or so generations back would not change their attitudes.

You're right, it wouldn't change any attitudes. But it would get you a beating from a bunch of pissed-off skinheads.

weak argument

[Khashishi]

The article isn't all that convincing. Just because the number of humans was small and the number of ancestor branches is large isn't enough to say that one's ancestors make up all the humans.

Essentially, the article is implying that people in all geographical areas have been in interbreeding contact with peoples of all other geographical areas--within the last 5000 years!

It seems like some kind of feel-good rhetoric (we are all one people). Prove it.

Re:weak argument

[geoff lane]

Walking just 100 yards a day would allow a population to reach the entire earth in about 1000 years or 30 generations. Do it at the right time and there was a permanent ice/land bridge between asia and alaska.

whatever

[dartmongrel]

The article says all humans alive today can trace their ancestry to one person who lived between 5000 and 2000 BC. I call bullshit on that one. Have a look at the various places on Earth humans had already migrated to during that time frame, and you'll quickly realize that this theory is flawed somewhere. I suspect that this article has other motives.

So our family tree has no forks?

[mrmeval]

WE'RE ALL REDNECKS!

Nice for Europeans...

[jaymzter]

But if you're one of the races that may have been dislocated due to the depradations of colonialism or slavery, you're pretty much denied any chance of a family tree dating back to the "Golden Age of Greece".
Yes, it comes off as a troll or flamebait, but that's not the intent. It's just a sad fact of history that there's a lot of people disconnected from their past due to the way the world operated at a particular point. So flame away, but I'd rather hear any ideas that could work around the problem.

From TFA

[ElephanTS]

Every Sunni Muslim in Iraq is descended from at least one Shiite

Sorry, this annoyed me. There are plenty of Sunnis and Shiites in any extended Iraqi family today living happily side by side, not caring about the difference in hand positions during prayer. Sunnis and Shiites are not mortal enemies as is so lazily portrayed in the media. They fought along side each other in the war against Iran just 25 years ago for example. This generally artificial tension is being produced as a convenient cover for the disaster that is Iraq and gives Bushco the ability to walk away from their mess and blame it on civil war. As long as they keep the oil rich areas and the new military bases civil war it would even suit them. Hence this false meme.

Re:From TFA

[TubeSteak]

If you knew anything about Iraq & Iran, you'd know that Iraq is an Arab country and Iran is a Persian country.

The Arabs have a long running grudge against the Persian empire, which Saddam used to unite the Iraqi people during that war.

Maybe 30% of Iraqi families are mixed Sunni-Shia. To pretend that the sectarian violence in Iraq isn't religiously motivated is ignorance in the extreme.

It's exactly the thing that Bush Sr. predicted would happen if he invaded Iraq. So he didn't. If you honestly believe that "This generally artificial tension is being produced as a convenient cover" then i suggest you go read a book or two, because Civil War is exactly what most political scientists expected would happen.

Silly PC Feelgoodism

[Baldrson]

Some idiot with a PhD in molecular genetics (not population genetics) while debating me once blurted out that the human race is in a "Hardy-Wienberg Equilibrium", which is essentially the impression intended by the referenced article. What HRE means is that there is no "population structure" such as "races" -- which plays very well with the PC Feelgoodism that has been elevated to a state of theocratic dogma by the current zeigeist pervading not just media and academia but governmental circles. Of course when I pointed out that no one, not even the most politically correct academics claims such nonsense, he detonated and started telling me to blow my brains out.

This is par for the course really.

The reality is there is a lot of inbreeding among most populations -- so much so that the bugaboo of "geographic race", which is supposed to be nothing more than folk taxonomy or folksonomy, is actually one of the strongest predictors of genetic makeup medical researchers can use without going to the level of an actual DNA assay. A lot of this brain noise can be traced back to a little academic slight of hand committed by Richard Lewontin when he published a peer-reviewed paper circa 1970 that studied the population structure of certain genes. He then went on to write a book which did not pass peer review but which got a lot of publicity for the claim that "there is more variation within than between races" -- an idiom that is now part of the catechism of liberal arts academia.

Well, unfortunately, this was an appealing fallacy, as shown by one of the grand old men of population genetics, AWF Edwards in Human genetic diversity: Lewontin's fallacy published under the peer-reviewed Bioessays about 30 years after Lewontin's non-peer-reviewed popular science book posing as academic debunking of popular prejudice. Why so long before such a peer-reviewed debunking? Well, this is the clever part -- Lewontin never bothered to publish his little catechism in any peer reviewed paper so there was never any basis for answering it within academia. Edwards actually had to depart somewhat from academic convention in addressing a popular misconception posing as academic wisdom that had influenced the government and culture profoundly for an entire generation!

The article is flat-out WRONG.

[Sosetta]

By the article's argument, when you go back 40 generations, you have 2^40 ancestors, or 4 quadrillion ancestors. This is clearly impossible. There simply weren't that many people alive then. So how do you explain the discrepency of numbers? Massive global inbreeding. Go back 10 generations, and you'll find that your family tree branches back on itself many times. The "mathematical" proof that everyone's related is not proof at all. There's nothing to indicate truly common ancestry. In fact, the current level of mobility that many people experience is orders of magnitude greater than what most kings experienced even as little as 500 years ago. It's a silly article.

Thirty Ghosts

[Cow Jones]

Reminds me of something I heard on a documentary about Stanley Kubrick a few days ago. Arthur C. Clarke was talking about his Space Odyssey novel, and he remarked:

"Behind every man now alive stand thirty ghosts, for that is the ratio by which the dead outnumber the living. Since the dawn of time, roughly a hundred billion human beings have walked the planet Earth.
"Now this is an interesting number, for by a curious coincidence there are approximately a hundred billion stars in our local universe, the Milky Way. So for every man who has ever lived, in this universe, there shines a star."

Considering that the statement is from 1968 we'll probably have to add a couple of ghosts to that number. Anyway, interesting line of thought.

You can be a universal ancestor too!

[claes]

Richard Dawkins writes in The Ancestors Tale (page 43, "The Tasmanian's Tale") that roughly 80 percent of all invidiviuals of a current population will be universal ancestors to all living decendants a certain number of generations later. How many generations? That depends on the populations size: roughly the base 2 logarithm of the population size number of generations. This is more true for small, isolated populations, especially on islands (Tasmania is given as example) - you can not take the current population of people on earth today (6 billions) and trust this number.

Supposed to...

[Chmcginn]

but I dunno. I mean, they still give me mod points every other week, and I just close my eyes and click.

Indeed, Jewishness

[Flying pig]

is passed through the female line. As the Roman author had it, mater certus, pater semper incertus est (The mother is certain, the father always uncertain.)

Re:Indeed, Jewishness

[XchristX]

Yeah. Matrilineal and matriarchial societies exit among Tamils, Meghas (in North-Estern India), communities in Andhra Pradesh (specially Telegu Jews, who keep strict records of their matrilineage) etc.

Surprisingly numerous, these matriarchials...

Re:Indeed, Jewishness

[Mistshadow2k4]

This may be off-topic, but I wanted to bring this in context. It's not just "other" peoples who have been matrilineal. The Celts were matrilineal as well, and some notable families in Europe remained matrilineal even past the Middle Ages. Many, many Native American tribes are matrilineal. What changed this? Christianity brining decidedly Roman attitudes. So, if you have Native American and/or Celtic ancestry, your ancestors were matrilinral. That covers most people in the Americas and Western Europe.

Re:Indeed, Jewishness

[the phantom]

Offtopic, but I feel it is important to point out that there is a great deal of difference between matrilineal organization and matriarchy. Matriarchy is where the women hold political, social, and/or religious power. In a matriarchy, the women are the primary owners of private property, and make the decisions that affect what the group will do. There are almost no examples of matriarchal societies in human history. That is not to say that a few have not popped up, but they are very rare and far between. On the other hand, a matrilineal society is one in which inheritence (of name, property, clan association, moity association, position, &c.) is passed through the female line. Generally, men are still in charge, but relationships are tracked by way of the female line.

Re:Indeed, Jewishness

[XchristX]

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

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-wea r.jpg

  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.

Re:Indeed, Jewishness

[XchristX]

I have cited a society. A very large society. The population of Maharashtra (as of 2001) is 96,752,247. That's a lot of people, and this type of matriarchy is not uncommon among them. That's 2% of the world's population, 30% of the population of North America. hardly a small enough number to dismiss so casually.

Re:Indeed, Jewishness

[cwspain]

What changed this? Christianity brining decidedly Roman attitudes.

Actually, not Christianity bringing Roman attitudes, but Romans. For the first few centuries of Christianity in Ireland and northern Great Britain, it had a distinctly Celtic flavor, including a greater degree of gender equality and married clergy. Some even believe that St. Brigid was a bishop (the evidence is not very strong in either direction). The change came when the Celts started sending missionaries to the European mainland and they came into some conflict with Rome because they did things differently. It was at that point that Rome tightened control over the Celtic church and brought them in line with the Roman way of doing things.

Re:Indeed, Jewishness

[Nomad37]

Two points to make:

1. No need to get partisan about the Hindu / Muslim thing in this debate. A Muslim might say that Islam shows more respect for women's equality, right to choose her path in life etc as evidenced by its very progressive views on divorce whereas Hindu doctrine requires women to be burned when their husbands die. This is of course an inflammatory gloss over the subtleties of both religions (excuse the pun) but that's my point - let's not go round and round the mulberry bush.

2. I don't agree with your example of the woman being the 'real' power in the house as being an example of matriarchal society. The same is true of most societies. It's apparent in the (western) feminist critique of the western liberal doctrine of the divide between private/public spheres. And if we were to adopt that distinction, it would quickly become apparent that a matriarchal society is one in which women hold power in public spheres. Maybe the Kerelan example suggested by a fellow poster - not familiar enough to judge myself.

Anyway, just my 2 cents.

Incestuous Science

[Doc Ruby]

Every human on Earth can trace our ancestries to someone who lived as recently as the Abraham Lincoln administration. Unless they spent some generations on another planet, or were recently created by an upstart god who got funding for Creation 2.0.

Really, what an insipid take on human descent. The writers might find plenty of inspiration in thinking that every warring religious faction is made of mere cousins. But the real agenda here is to say that our "common ancestors" were Adam and Eve, cryptoreligious "science" that insists the world was created around 6-7000 years ago. Statistical oversimplifications claiming "mathematical certainty" are easy meat for half-bright reporters. But when they don't bother to explain how isolated populations like deep Amazonian tribes factor into the "probability model", it's clear they're looking for data to fit their foregone conclusion. People who first encountered Europeans in the past few dozen years, whose ancestors migrated from Asia probably 30,000 years ago, are the obvious distant relatives to explain, not Palestinians and Jews who have already been experimentally demonstrated.

Re:Incestuous Science

[tfried]

But the real agenda here is to say that our "common ancestors" were Adam and Eve

No, this is absolutely not the point of the article, nor is it implied in any which way. Read TFA again, if you really think so. The article says that each of the millions of persons in the 5000 B.C. timeframe who had offspring are ancestors(*) to all of us. It also only gives an estimate of the latest point at which this should be true, not the earliest point. Nowhere, and in no way does the article seek to make out "the two first human beings" or try to date them.

Further, as others have pointed out, for the purpose of passing down a family tree/ancestry - in contrast to substantial genetic inheritance - a single migrant ever coming to an "isolated population" is absolutely enough to "infect" an entire population several generations down the line. As an example for the difference between genetic inheritance and ancestry: Your great-great-great-great-grandfather is just as much your ancestor as your direct father. He only handed down a tiny fraction of his genes, however.

(*): And not just once - such a person would be highly likely to be found on our family tree several times! Read the article for an explanation. Then go shock your local cleric with your new insight on inbreeding.

Re:Incestuous Science

[identity0]

Jesus Chri- er, I mean, Charles Darwin, people! It's perfectly obvious that all humans are related at some point, unless there is a group of cave-dwellers descended from hydrothermal vent bacteria who are not vertebrate arthropods of the kingdom Animalia, domain Eukaryote, with a completely differnt evolutionary history, who just *happened* to evolve the exact same biological features of modern humans.

This discussion seems to have been derailed by people who have not read the article or really thought about what it is saying. I have, and while thir methodlogy seems somewhat questionable, I don't disagree with the possibility of it happening.

Now the issue is, how close to the current time can all modern humans trace their ancestors? Well, that is an interesting question. 500BC sounds hard to account for people who have lived in the Americas and Australia who have not had European genes mixed in since their contact after 1500 AD or so. They seem to have left Eurasia during the last ice age, more than 10,000 years before.

On the other hand, it doesn't require one single person to visit those peoples in order for their genes to travel. Over the course of many generations, a person's descendants could move about and spread his genes. Even if he/she only moved to the next village, or made one ocean crossing, they could easily spread throughout the world, including to populations that had lived in relative isolation for thousands of years.

All it really takes is for one person to make it to someplace near an isolated community, and for their genes to be passed on. The natural shuffling of descendants between local communities will eventually ensure that their genes will spread to everyone in the region. Note that it will be a very small fraction of the genes, but it will be there.

Now I take issue with this comment: "Had you entered any village on Earth in around 3,000 B.C., the first person you would have met would probably be your ancestor," Hein marveled. Okay, he qualifies it with 'probably', but he does not seem to account for groups which were wiped out by natural disasters or wars. Those people would be more like uncles and aunts, not direct ancestors.

I would like to see the statistics backed up with more actual genetic data, but the study is interesting, at least.

Re:Incestuous Science

[tfried]

> I would like to see the statistics backed up with more actual genetic data, but the study is interesting, at least.

Don't mix up genetics and ancestry. The genes of a person from 100 generations ago would be entirely dissolved and not measurable today. This person could only pass on 1/2^100 of his genes to any particular person living today. That's technically nothing at all. Ancestry is an entirely different story, and really more of a mathematical concept: This person could still be 100% your ancestor, as ancestry is just defined that way.

So 1) genetic data does not help much with this at all. 2) Passing down your ancestry/family tree is much "easier" than passing down your genes. That's an important part of the reason why the result is plausible indeed, even taking isolated populations into account.

Another way of putting it...

[RealGrouchy]

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>

Yeah, it's BS

[MarkusQ]

Have a look at the various places on Earth humans had already migrated to during that time frame, and you'll quickly realize that this theory is flawed somewhere.

Yeah, it's BS. Consider the Australian aborigines. Or the people of New Guinea. Or even native Americans. It nonsensical on the face of it.

--MarkusQ

Re:Yeah, it's BS

[MarkusQ]

Nuts. All it takes to make this claim false is one pure blooded Aborigine. Given that some tribes were only discovered in the last hundred years, and have rarely been contacted, the probability much greater (approaching certainty) that the claim is false than that it is true.

--MarkusQ

Re:Additional Startling Implication: Genetic Disea

[angel'o'sphere]

The offspring of an Eskimo-African couple will typically have a stronger set of genes than the offspring of an Eskimo-Eskimo couple, a German-German couple, or a Vietnamese-Vietnamese couple.

This makes no sense.

The offsprings of to compleatly healthy parents can only get a genetic defect by external influences, like virus infections during pregnancy, posions(chemicals) or radiation etc.

If the parents have 100% perfect genes, the children will have as well. No matter how close the parents are related.

Your above conclusion is completely wrong, a mildly genetic defected Vietnamse (lets say red/green colour blind defect on one cromosome, not on both) and a mildly defected Escimo (Inuit) (lets say mongoloism on one chromosome) will have:
25% completely healthy children (neither red/green colour blindness nor mongoloism got transfred but the healthy parts of the paretns chromosome sets)
25% will only have the colour blindness genes from

one

parent but the healthy set of the Escimo (which results in a not colour blind offspring, but he weares the defect)
25% will only have

one

chromosoem set defected by mongoloism, but be healthy as the chromosomes from the other parent will fix it
25% will have both defects, but the opposing set of the other parent will fix it, so they appear not ill.

Bottom line all offsprings appear healthy but 75% of them wear the defect genes.

OTOH if 2 parents with both a defect on only one chromosome (red/green colour blind) get children it looks like this:
25% are completely healthy, inheriting the non defect copy of the chromosome from each parent
25% have the defect chromosome from the mother, but appear healthy
25% have the defect chromosome from the father, but appear healthy
25% have the defect chromosome from the mother

AND

the defect chromosome from the father and appear ill

Conclusion: interbreeding in a narrow gene pool only has a negative effect if there are defect genes in it (or get added by mutating effects). As long as parents "appear" not ill and only "carry" the defect the defect gene is "thinned" out over several generations

if

only completely healthy (no defect at all) mates come into the bloodline. The idea that 2 mildly defected groups of seperated populations will "heal" their combined offsprings is completely wrong, in fact 25% of them will be more ill than the parents.

Contrary to popular beliefe, there is

no

stronger set of genes , either it is defect or it is not, and the way how it is inherited by offsprings is simple combination.

angel'o'sphere

Re:We All Descend from Noah

[KingSkippus]

Or could it?

No.

And now that you mention it, yes, that is a foul. Please confine yourself for 10 minutes in the Slashdot penalty box.

Ignores geographic isolation

[cfulmer]

Take a native american in the 1700s. Is he descended from some greek guy 3000 years earlier? I have my doubts -- if I recall my anthropology, the natives came here long before Greece was a major power. If there are any purebred native americans around today, then you'd have to go back a lot more than 3000 years to find an ancestor that he has in common with, say, a bushman in Africa.

Better links

[Alien54]

First there's this story about

Genealogists discover royal roots on every family tree

In which they discuss the royal roots of Brooke Shields.

What is it about Brooke? Well, nothing -- at least genealogically.

Even without a documented connection to a notable forebear, experts say the odds are virtually 100 percent that every person on Earth is descended from one royal personage or another.

then there is this old link to the notion of the Most Recent Common Ancestor of Mankind.

The huge number of proven descents of people from common European royal ancestry in historical times, when considered with the vastly greater number of descents that must exist but are not among the rare few that can be proven, suggest strongly that everyone, in the West at least, is descended from an MRCA in historical times. They suggest, for example, that everyone in the West is descended from Charlemagne, c. 800 AD.

It would seem possible that, even with a lot of geographical separation, the MRCA of the entire world is still within historical times, 3000 BC - 1000 AD. In fact, it is quite likely the entire world is descended from the Ancient Egyptian royal house, c. 1600 BC.

We pick them as an example because they left proven descents for centuries, so it seems likely their descents did not die out, and they are ancestors of some people alive today. Hence probably ancestors of all people alive today.

Quite likely almost everyone in the world descends from Confucius, c. 500 BC. We pick him as an example because he is the proven ancestor of some people alive today. Hence probably the ancestor of all people alive today.

Atlantic Magazine, among others, had a story on this a few years back.

The mathematical study of genealogy indicates that everyone in the world is descended from Nefertiti and Confucius, and everyone of European ancestry is descended from Muhammad and Charlemagne

It was only ONE time!

[SnarfQuest]

You know, it was on a Saturday night, after a really long week, and I have never drank that much before, and I honestly don't remember what all happened for the rest of that weekend. I swear, they told me they were over 16...

It only takes one...

[Pink Tinkletini]

It only takes one European crossing the ocean to make Americans start popping out babies with European heritage. Let simmer a few generations and the whole idea becomes plausible.

Note that it could just as easily have been a lone American crossing to Europe.

Re:Eww yuck!

[radtea]

There is no rationale behind it whatsoever and having a pedigree to show that say, (for the most common example) a white supremacist and Martin Luther King Jr. share common ancestors 60 or so generations back would not change their attitudes.

I agree it won't change their attitude, but given the deplorable fact of extensive inter-breeding between mostly black slaves and mostly-white plantation owners prior to the Civil War, it is extremely likely that a white supremacist in the U.S. South and Martin Luther King Jr. would share a common ancestor a lot less than 60 generations back.

The idea of "racial purity" is a myth for stupid people, and as more knowledge of human genetics and human ancestry accumulates this will become so obvious that even people stupid enough to be racists will have a hard time avoiding it. We will find there is a literal handful of "racially pure" people on the planet, and they will be from isolated tribes who simply lacked the opportunity to practice the vigorous out-breeding that is part of humanity's evolutionary modus operandi.

Re:Additional Startling Implication: Genetic Disea

[Grym]

Humans, before we had modern technology that allowed us to travel great distances in short periods of time, had very little contact outside of our own tribes. To put, humans lived within their own tribes for hundreds of thousands of years.

I've just completed a bachelor's degree in Biology and a graduate level course in evolutionary genetics and I have never heard of these kinds of statements from any scientific source. In fact, the only place I have heard them from were from people who stress racial purity and--more specifically--white supremacy.

Regardless, what you're saying is ridiculous. Humans are the most prolific mammal on the face of the earth; we're everywhere. We are this way because it is our nature to be both curious and aggressive. You're not giving our ancestors or the human drive for exploration enough credit. Besides, even under your theory, how did the individual ethnic groups arrive in their respective regions were it not for this migration, mmm? (Hint for the uninitiated: the typical answer to this is "God put them there.")

For any human population a certain number of migrants is a given. This inevitably creates geneflow between populations which are otherwise isolated. The result is that human populations are generally homogenous, despite the great geographic distances separating the groups themselves. A very extreme example of this effect is demonstrated with ring species, whose sub-populations are actually infertile with one another (clearly not the case with people) but still maintain a common character (ie. they do not diverge) because of geneflow.

To be certain, there are differences between racial and ethnic groups, but these differences are superficial and do not reflect the genome as a whole. Scientific studies of DNA microsattelites have confirmed this time and time again. In fact, the study in the article is just one of many.

. Why do you think the traits of various ethnic groups were selected? Do you think they are randomly arranged? No, they were selected based on adaptations to the environment of that group of people. Mixing in differnet traits that do not fit well into that environment will result in those traits being removed.

Yes and no. What you're talking about is a homozygous advantage. For many populations this is true--but not for people. Why? Because we aren't necessarily beholden to our environments anymore. If you're less tolerant of the sun, you can wear sunscreen. If you're less tolerant to the heat, you can get air conditioning. Even in the most extreme cases, homozygous advantage doesn't apply. For instance, populations that have lived in the Andes mountains have developed genetic adaptations that allow them to breathe in much lower concentrations of oxygen than normally allowed. And yet, still, most tourists to these mountains are still able to survive (and even enjoy themselves) by supplementing their oxygen.

But if no the environment, what are humans subject to? Their own genes. To some extent this can be compensated for. (I know I for one would probably have died in ages past because of my nearsightedness.) But even with today's technology, genetic defects are often untreatable and sometimes fatal. This is particularly relevant in the case of recessive genetic disorders, where the extreme effects of a homozygous recessive trait can be masked. This creates a situation where heterozygotes are superior, because of a reduced likelihood of genetic disorders. I'm pretty sure this is the scientific basis of the OP's more-simplified statements.

In practice, however, this is often difficult to take advantage of because our assignment of race is completely arbitrary and based upon the phenotype of an individual and not his or her genotype. So, for instance, a black and white couple in Claxton, Georgia (a historic site of genetic samplin

Somewhat misleading

[sgent]

The Jewish religion is passed down through the mother. To inherit judaism, your mother must be jewish.

That said, the religious status (priest/Levite, Cohain), tribe, and inheritance are all passed through the father. For instance, David was the scion of Saul. His mother was irrelavent to his being King of Isreal.

Re:Somewhat misleading

[Hepneck]

Neither of David's parents were relevant to his becoming king. Jonathan was the scion of Saul, as he was Saul's son. David, the son of Jesse (and later Jonathan's best friend), was unrelated to Saul, and became king because he was annointed by the prophet Samuel. Neither David's patrilineal, nor his matrilineal line mattered to his being king of Israel.
Your facts were wrong, your point is right.

Re:Somewhat misleading

[WedgeTalon]

This is where a "+1 Pwned" modding would come in handy.

Re:Somewhat misleading

[egjertse]

This is slashdot. You would be equaly corrected (if not flamed, scolded and ridiculed) for making similar mistakes about Star Trek, Tolkien or The Simpsons plots.

-1, Incoherent Rant

[Tim]

"Some idiot with a PhD in molecular genetics (not population genetics) while debating me once blurted out that the human race is in a "Hardy-Wienberg Equilibrium", which is essentially the impression intended by the referenced article."

The "idiot" was wrong, but so are you: the article makes no reference to Hardy-Weinburg equilibria, nor does it need to -- it doesn't discuss allele frequencies.

"What HRE means is that there is no "population structure" such as "races" -- which plays very well with the PC Feelgoodism that has been elevated to a state of theocratic dogma by the current zeigeist pervading not just media and academia but governmental circles."

Whoa...settle down, there, Cletus. The liberals aren't coming to get you today!

Incoherent, vaguely conservative ranting about "dogma" and "zeigests" aside, you don't understand the definition of Hardy-Weinburg equilibria (perhaps that's why you're so upset!) Simply put, HRE tells us how to predict the stable frequencies of dominant and recessive alleles within a closed population. It's a fundamental theorem of population genetics, not a wedge issue in the Culture War.

This article is about ancestry, and makes a simple mathematical argument that human beings are all related. It doesn't make a commentary about race or geographical diversity. Get a grip.

Re:Skeptical...

[tfried]

My "common sense" was rebelling as well, until I figured out I used the wrong model of thought. This is not about genetic relatedness. It's about family trees. You may have only inherited a 1/2^40 fraction of your great-[37 more "great"s]-grand-father's genes (which is probably less than a single base pair!). But he's still 100% your ancestor. Genetic inheritance and ancestry are two entirely different concepts.

This also explains the thing about "corners of the gene pool that just don't mix very much". They don't need to for the concept of ancestry. A single migrant is enough to hand down his entire family tree to an entire population, while their DNA is quickly dissolved in the local gene pool.

Indeed, 20% of fathers, aren't.

[Colin Smith]

http://www.childsupportanalysis.co.uk/analysis_and _opinion/choices_and_behaviours/misattributed_pate rnity.htm

ok, it seems to vary from about 5%, but rates of 20% - 30% are common. So... Guys... have you had a DNA test?

Re:Eww yuck!

[Dlugar]

Angel Boris actually has a Bacon Number of 2:

1. Angel Boris was in Suicide Blonde (1999) with Robert Deacon
2. Robert Deacon was in Wild Things (1998) with Kevin Bacon

(Source: The Oracle of Bacon at Virginia)

Which makes three steps from you to Kevin Bacon. HTH, HAND!

Dlugar

Faulty Logic

[cylence]

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.

Re:Persian country?

[TubeSteak]

Iran isn't a Persian Country.

Persia was the name used outside of Iran up until 1935.
Iranians called their land Iran beginning around 226 AD/CE
Yes, I wrote that correctly. 1,780 years of calling themselves Iranians.

Before 226 AD, the Persians referred to themselves as Aryanam, which the word "Iran" is a spinoff of. The earliest written self-reference of the Persians as Aryanam was in 486 BC. That stretches the Iranian timeline back another 712 years.

Iranians are Caucasians

Iran (the Persian Empire) started out roughly 700 BC when several Aryan tribes united.
Iran literally means "the land of Aryans"
Culturally and linguistically they're Aryans.
Ethnically, Iran (the Persian Empire) is a mix, which includes Caucusians.

It's a bit confusing to discuss since the 'Iranian (Persian) people' covers more than just the people inside Iran's current border.

P.S. Aryan, as I'm using it, has nothing to do with the racial supremecists or Nazis. In the 1900's they confused & bastardized the word.

Fallacy of inheritance?

[Anonymous Coward]

There seems to be some kind of a fallacy operating here, which I don't quite understand, between this formal or mathematical notion of being somebody's ancestor or being descended from them, and the biological concept of inheritance in which you actually carry someone's genes (or they carry yours). I mean, my first generation of offspring has half my genes, the next generation has a quarter, then an eighth; if there are finite boundaries, then it must go effectively to zero. So, given that we have a finite number of genes, it would seem that there is a finite number of generations in which one set of genes is likely to be extinguished among at least some fraction of the descended population. So if I contribute my genes to a community -- say I fly to another continent by prehistoric rocket sled ten thousand years ago or whatever, and mate with one of the ones I find attractive, then her family decides to cook and eat me, really eager to show off this fire thing -- how many generations before most of my so-called "descendants" no longer carry any of my genes, even though some of them do carry some? Must happen eventually. But, this article considers all the formal descendants of Anonymous Prehistoric Coward the First to be actual biological descendants of Anonymous Coward -- or at least, it conflates the two notions into one -- as if we are related because my gene touched a gene that touched your gene, or something like that, just the same as if you actually have my freckles.

An interesting tangent to that is, we know my brother and I share, like, a lot of the same genes. If we both have descendants, and all this mixing happens, somewhere down the line our bloodlines cross again and some future descendant carries, say, the brown-eyed bullshitter gene. But whose descendant is he, mine or my brother's? And does it matter? We know he's our father's... but it's the same gene, anyway. Kind of becomes irrelevant, by that point.

I think if you get really careful about defining what you mean by relatedness, this article will end up making a lot more sense, but will have much less sweeping implications. But underlying it is still the moral fact, if you want to call it that, that we are all human beings and as individuals, are really just different examples of the same basic thing. The fact that any two of us "could" be related really means that the similarities outweigh the differences.

LDS Church

[mulhollandj]

Nobody does family history like the LDS church. Check out www.familysearch.org. You can even download free software. It is interesting some of the changes they are doing such as scanning in petabytes of microfilm and indexing it through thousands of volunteers. They are also going to try to make some sort of a world tree using a wiki-like format. I also believe they are going to incorporate GIS data so you can see where people have moved around.

this holds for single alleles (genes), not individ

[amiable1]

The interesting argument, related to theories known for a century (Galon-Watson,Fisher) are correct for single genes, or completely linked clusters (e.g.mitochondria, Y chromosome). It does not hold in the presence of recombination.

In other words, the conclusion is false for entire individuals, but true for single genes or very tightly linked clusters.

Questions?

Tasmania is still a problem

[ynotds]

I'd go a bit further in support of Olson's findings being able to coexist with m-Eve, y-Adam and the Toba bottleneck, but with the disclaimer that the planet is big enough and complex enough for outliers that his model misses.

In particular we know that the Tasmanians were truly isolated for more than 10K years and that while the pure line did not survive the British invasion, there are descendents of Tasmanians from -10K alive today, yet very clearly not everybody is descended from those Tasmanians, so Olson's supplementary claim that there is a single set of everybody's ancestors who were alive around -7K falls over.

I'd expect Tasmania is not even a unique exception, but others might be a lot harder to prove. Those outliers apart, the rest makes broad sense and the relative mobility of genes, might help resolve a few other misconceptions about recent human evolution, especially the post-modern selection pressures favouring poverty and stupidity.

The perfect argument

[ynotds]

While there are other clues that any notion of extended periods of genetic isolation of Australia in recent millenia is misguided, the dingo argument puts that to rest. By the time of the British invasion, dingos had spread through out mainland Australia, but not Tasmania, which does at least provide an exception to Olsen's supplementary claim.

Nothing new here

[FSMonster]

As Richard Dawkins said, it's true indeed there was an 'ancestral Adam (and Eve)', but he could have lived ten or a hundred thousand years ago. The calculations they performed works with arbitrary variables they input and then wait what number comes out. Might be fun, like Google Trends, but ultimately inconsequential.

Pigeonhole Principle

[ShakaUVM]

Authors don't understand the pigeonhole principle:

(From the FA): "Keep going back in time, and there are fewer and fewer people available to put on more and more branches of the 6.5 billion family trees of people living today. It is mathematically inevitable that at some point, there will be a person who appears at least once on everybody's tree."

No, not at all. You could have, for example, two completely separate branches of humanity (say one in the Americas and one everywhere else) that never interbred except at the very beginning of the human species. Pigeonhole Principle. The only thing thats mathematically inevitable is that at least two ancestors somewhere is shared. Somewhere. For example, mathematically, a very prolific couple could have been responsible for all X billion people minus a small group living in an uncharted area, whose roots go all the way back to the beginning.

Bad math, shame on the authors for writing it.

this is absurd!

[skam240]

maybe some one else mentioned this already and i just missed it but doesnt it seem a bit absurd to anyone else the suggestion that humanity's one common ancestor was around during the golden age of greece? how the hell would said ancestor make it down into australia or the americas fast enough to become the single common ancestor for all of humanity? i'm certain that south america and australia still have blood lines that havent been touched by individuals from outside their continent and those populations were established well before the golden age of greece.

slave-owning white trash

[grushenka]

Not likely. The typical white supremecist's ancestors would not have been able to afford slaves.

Um, not. Great-granddaddy was poor white racist trash, coming from probably your typical subsistence farming South Carolina background, and his family owned slaves (just a few) before the war. This was normal - even the slightly better-off poor had slaves.

Also, need I mention Trent Lott or Strom Thurmond?