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All of which is true, but Mark Anthony gets us well into the historical period. We have a pretty good sense from that of who did and who didn't get around. It
by samatman 4y ago
All of which is true, but Mark Anthony gets us well into the historical period.
We have a pretty good sense from that of who did and who didn't get around.
It's surely the case that the vast majority of Japanese on Hokkaido are not descendants of Mark Anthony. On Kyshu, maybe, the Portuguese contributed some genes there.
We can really only be detailed about this with a Y chromosome for a man, or mitochondrial lineage for a woman, and that only covers the case of lineal descent.
Not only can we not determine with confidence who is or isn't a descendent, even given a complete DNA sequence we don't have: most of those descendents won't have any Mark Anthony DNA at all! Chromosomes are more chopped than sifted, if that makes sense, I'm going on memory here, but somewhere around the 12th generation, we start having phantom ancestors: they existed, but left no record in our genes.
- ch4s3 4y agoYeah, of course the math makes sense but one can clearly find pockets of people it likely doesn't apply to. And for sure, trying to point to specific ancestors isn't really possible you don't even need to go back 12 generations in some cases if memory serves. My main point is that its becoming clear that many supposedly very isolated populations have in fact had gene mixture with outside groups in the not distant past and that there were large pre-modern migrations and mixing events.
- saalweachter 4y agoIf I'm recalling the numbers correctly, there's somewhere between a one in a million and one in a billion chance of not inheriting any DNA from one of your grandparents -- unlikely, but not so unlikely that there aren't dozens or hundreds of people walking around for whom that is true.