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> modern human may have twice as many female ancestors as male ancestors. I'm having trouble to understand how this can be true. It seems like every human shou
by assbuttbuttass 5y ago
> modern human may have twice as many female ancestors as male ancestors.
I'm having trouble to understand how this can be true. It seems like every human should have equal numbers of male and female ancestors, e.g. by induction on how many generations back you look.
- anthonypasq 5y agoeveryone has more single uncles than single aunts. Human history was not entirely monogamous, and a few number of men mated a larger number of women.
- contradistinct 5y agoA single man can be your ancestor in more than one slot on your family tree.
- thaumasiotes 5y agoYes, but this is pretty severely understated. Everyone in your family tree definitely will appear there many times over, except for very recent ancestors. Taking an average human generation time of 25 years, you would theoretically have 2^30 = roughly a billion ancestors 30 generations back, or 750 years ago. But the population of the Earth in 1300 was... maybe 400 million. (e.g. https://www.census.gov/data/tables/time-series/demo/international-programs/historical-est-worldpop.html https://www.census.gov/data/tables/time-series/demo/internat... for world population estimates) And your ancestors in 1300 aren't drawn from the entire population of the world; they're drawn from a tightly restricted subset of that. And if you think that's ridiculous, imagine how many ancestors you'd have thirty-one generations back!