The Ancestor Paradox

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There are several ways to think about ancestry, and all of them suggest you have fewer unique ancestors than you might think.

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To learn more about this topic, start your googling with these keywords:
Genealogy: a line of descent traced continuously from an ancestor.
Genetic ancestor: a person from whom an individual is biologically descended
Genetic ancestry: the genetic origin of a person's population, and the specific lines of descent through which they inherited DNA from their ancestors.
Pedigree: the recorded ancestry, especially upper-class ancestry, of a person or family.
Pedigree collapse: a term used in genealogy to describe when the number of distinct ancestors in a family tree is smaller than it would be otherwise.

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Cameron Duke | Script Writer, Narrator and Director
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REFERENCES
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Coop, Graham. “How Many Genetic Ancestors Do I Have?” Gcbias, 11 Nov. 2013, gcbias.org/2013/11/11/how-does-your-number-of-genetic-ancestors-grow-back-over-time/

“How Many People Have Ever Lived on Earth? | Corrections Environmental Scan.” info.nicic.gov/ces/global/population-demographics/how-many-people-have-ever-lived-earth.

Lachance, Joseph. “Inbreeding, Pedigree Size, and the Most Recent Common Ancestor of Humanity.” Journal of Theoretical Biology, vol. 261, no. 2, Nov. 2009, pp. 238–247, https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jtbi.2009.0...

Pattison, J.E. “New Method of Estimating Inbreeding in Large Semi-Isolated Populations with Application to Historic Britain.” HOMO, vol. 52, no. 2, 2001, pp. 117–134, https://doi.org/10.1078/0018-442x-00024

Reich, David. Who We Are and How We Got Here : Ancient DNA and the New Science of the Human Past. New York, Pantheon Books, 2018.

Rohde, Douglas L. T., et al. “Modelling the Recent Common Ancestry of All Living Humans.” Nature, vol. 431, no. 7008, 1 Sept. 2004, pp. 562–566, https://doi.org/10.1038/nature02842

Schiffels, Stephan, and Richard Durbin. “Inferring Human Population Size and Separation History from Multiple Genome Sequences.” Nature Genetics, vol. 46, no. 8, 22 June 2014, pp. 919–925, https://doi.org/10.1038/ng.3015

Wikipedia Contributors. “Pedigree Collapse.” Wikipedia, Wikimedia Foundation, 11 Jan. 2024, en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pedigree_collapse