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It's not enough that they "had any children". For example, if they had exactly one child, and that child was childless, then they are not your ancestor. Biolog
by xamuel 3y ago
It's not enough that they "had any children". For example, if they had exactly one child, and that child was childless, then they are not your ancestor.
Biologists define the "identical ancestor point" to be the most recent time X in the past such that every person alive at time X is either an ancestor of everyone alive today, or of no-one alive today. Computer simulations suggest that the identical ancestor point is quite recent in geological terms, e.g., it's probably within the past few thousand years (it would be even more recent if we ignored remote places like Tanzania). See: Rohde et al (2004), "Modelling the recent common ancestry of all living humans", Nature. https://www.math.arizona.edu/~bhallmark/TMRCA/naturerohde.pdf https://www.math.arizona.edu/~bhallmark/TMRCA/naturerohde.pd...
- well_actulily 3y agoI assume you mean Tasmania here. From the linked paper: > In the case of Tasmania, which may have been completely isolated from mainland Australia between the flooding of the Bass Strait, 9,000–12,000 years ago, and the European colonization of the island, starting in 1803 (ref. 13), the IA date for all living humans must fall before the start of isolation. However, the MRCA date would be unaffected, because today there are no remaining native Tasmanians without some European or mainland Australian ancestry.
- defrost 3y agoTruganini may passed but members of the Pintupi Nine and other groups with no European blood remain alive. Oddly, portions of mainland Australia may have been as genetically isolated from each other as Tasmania, once particular environments were settled (ocean, river, desert, etc) they appear to have remained stable. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Truganini https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Truganini day the Pintupi Nine entered the modern world https://www.bbc.com/news/magazine-30500591 https://www.bbc.com/news/magazine-30500591 Aboriginal mitogenomes reveal 50,000 years of regionalism in Australia https://www.nature.com/articles/nature21416 https://www.nature.com/articles/nature21416