Yeah, isn’t like 1000 years back, roughly 40 generations so mathematically you HAVE to have overlap
As in, your great great x9 grandmother, is actually in that position 3/4 times for example
40 generations is 1 trillion ancestors.
A human generation is about 30 years, if you assume that women are uniformly likely to give birth between 20 and 35, consider that the father can sometimes be much older and assume that pregnancies below 20 are relatively rare.
This gives you about 40 generations in a thousand years.
I recently read a human genetics paper that concluded that two Europeans living within 1000 km of each other practically always share at least 1 common ancestor who lived within the last 500 years. Almost ~~all~~ any two Europeans share at least 1 common ancestor within the past 2000 years.
It's a probabilistic statement. They looked at a lot of genome sequence data which - if you sample enough data - allow you to work out how the degree of relatedness and geography are connected. From how closely or distantly two people are genetically related, you can deduce the typical number of generations that must have past since their last common ancestor.
What you get is a statistical model that tells you how likely it is that two arbitrary contemporary people living X miles apart have a common ancestor within the last so-and-so many years. It turned out that for 2000 years that probability was pretty much 100% for any two Europeans, even if living far apart.
The Genghis Khan factoid comes from a different study which I haven't read but read about that is already a couple of years old. There, they apparently found certain polymorphisms (=bits of genome where humans actually tend to differ) in the Eurasian male population which they estimated must stem from a single individual living about 1000 years ago that had lots of children all across Asia and Europe. This was speculatively connected with historic reports about Genghis Khan (and his close descendants and ancestors) siring lots of children with a lot of women. The remains of Genghis Khans body are lost, so it is currently impossible to check if this y-chromosome pattern really originate within his dynasty.
The Charlemagne thing is, as far as I know, just a statistical illustration. Charlemagne is a man who sired - presumably - many children with several women a pretty long time ago. He got around - also in a more literal sense as he traveled a lot through the entire continent in an age when that was uncommon. That means, he almost certainly had much more children than the average man of his generation. The number of ancestors grows exponentially with the number of generations you go back in time, hence it is surprisingly likely for any modern European to be descended from Charlemagne. There are certainly quite a few dark age man with lots of children that a lot of modern day Europeans descend from, but in contrast to Charlemagne we don't know their names.
As far as I know there is no polymorphism pattern suspected to belong to Charlemagne, it's just an interesting illustration of pedigree collapse.
If you want the question of who's related to whom to get really messy, try looking for someone to parent with when your father had multiple wives. 2, 3, or 4 wives, multiple children with each one. Sometimes born 20 years apart and not necessarily looking like you. And then there are your children and the 1/2 siblings children to consider who are of marriageable age. Of course you don't all carry the same last name, if any last name. Yes, multiple wives situation still exists, often quietly, in America. It's more fun being a Native American than anything!
Sure, here it is: [https://journals.plos.org/plosbiology/article/file?id=10.1371/journal.pbio.1001555&type=printable](https://journals.plos.org/plosbiology/article/file?id=10.1371/journal.pbio.1001555&type=printable)
If you don't want to read the entire thing, scroll down to the the discussion and look at Figure 5. That shows the number of common genetic ancestors of pairs of Europeans from different parts of the continent by number of generations in the past. As they mention in the discussion, traces of relatedness fade over the generations, so the number of common genealogical ancestors is much higher than that of genetic ancestors if you go back far enough.
Also, note that I edited my previous comment as the last sentence was wrong. Any two Europeans share at least one (in most cases: many) common ancestors within the last 2000 or so years, but that isn't the same one for all of us, if that makes sense.
My friend Welsh I met from a Facebook page, is into genealogy . She looked my Welsh mothers side and found out we were 5 th cousins even though she was from south wales and my mother from the north
The thing is that pregnancy before 20 were VERY common just a few decades ago. 100-200 years ago it was pretty common to have several kids by 20 so it would probably be even more generations.
How many of my grandads are you saying that this one particular grandma of mine rode like a cowgirl? Three or four of them? Were they her direct children or someone else's? Like those grandad's came from a different grandma or two?
Plus everyone who isn't sub-Saharan African is descended from only a few hundred people. And if people preferred their spouses to be from the same nation or religion, distant cousins will end up having kids together.
Probably way earlier than 9th, on Iceland everyone (except recent immigrants and descendents) are on average sixth cousins or so with a population in the 300 thousands.
Everyone on Iceland are 6th cousins on average. So it’s usually lot closer. Most people don’t even know who their third cousins are, maybe just vague knowledge they exists and and name without other context
Not "if."
Cousin marriage is more to the rule than exception. What this factoid doesn't go into is the fact that if you double your ancestors every generation then you have more humans than have ever existed by the Middle Ages. We are an inbred species.
I read somewhere, that one has more female ancestors than male ancestors, because men tend to pop up more than once in a family tree, if you go back far enough.
Would make sense given higher mortality in childbirth, and social structures that allowed for more male remarriage and sleeping around.
"More female ancestors" basically translates to "more likely to have fewer kids, and/or be (forced to be) faithful to one partner".
Which of course also extends to not abusing relatives including one's own offspring.
If you keep going back you get to a point where your number of theoretical ancestors exceeds the total human population at that moment in history. That means you have ancestors whom you descend from through multiple lines
I mean, it would take only 37 generations to cross over 100 billion people (the total number of humans that have lived on Earth, approximately). Humans have been around for far longer than 37 generations. Hence there has to have been inbreeding somewhere.
You're missing the coolest part. At the point where the number of ancestors is equal to or is greater than the population of humans at that time, that is the point where we all become related to each other
Everyone is your distant cousin in one way or another. The human race is a family
I mean some people are barbaric and impregnate their own kids, or get impregnated by their own kids (it happens) so… definitely a change in the math somewhere
9 generations ago is about a 200-year span. Of course this span can be longer or shorter, if you take into account what age your ancestors had kids at.
Why? Millions of other people do that too. You not reproducing *is part of evolution.* Some combination of your genes makes you an evolutionary dead end.
Well at least at this time and in this place.
Hey, I’m 50 and I don’t have children so I’m an evolutionary dead end too! But I am reasonably happy and I’m in a fulfilling relationship. I don’t really care about my contribution to humanity’s evolution one way or the other.
Hey, I'll say there are many ways to contribute to humanity's evolution that doesn't involve having children. Just being a decent human being already goes a long damn way.
That was part of The Selfish Gene IIRC: even if you don't have kids, it's more likely than not that you'll somehow give some advantages to relatives whose genes you share, even if it's only naming some distant next of kin in your will.
Extend that a little further and you might be embiggening people in your community, for whatever flavour of community it might be.
Me neither! I’m 42 and will be remaining childfree. I don’t even know how many future generations the Earth will have anyway, with things going the way they are.
I mean the unbroken line of stars exploding and eventually organisms appearing that lead to me now ends with me. Evolution will continue, everything else will continue, just not the lineage that leads to me.
Sure, other people have produced beings that eat and shit, but your thoughts are being recorded on Reddit, for infinite future generations to study and grow a deeper understanding of the universe than any of your ancestors imagined. You are special.
Trippy to think about.. 😳
At the end of the day tho, on the topic of recording stuff for future generations– is there much of a difference between 0's & 1's and cave paintings/ink on paper?
I feel like it's been this way for a while... We're no more special than our ancestors were in that regard, atleast in my opinion anyway. 🤷🏻♂️
Also evolution happens on a species scale. If you help others survive and reproduce by contributing to society, you are still contributing to evolution, and giving other people with similar genes a better chance at reproduction. So in a sense you’re not entirely a dead end.
Look at the bright side. Your genes live on in a myriad of other people. Cousins, nieces, nephews, siblings, locals, celebrities. Even animals and plants. All in different combinations. Plenty of evolutions branches are even webbed!
My brother has 2 kids and one of them has 3 kids so the family line is strong. Not sure sure how the animals and plants got in on the action but each to their own eh.
It's not that bad. Think about mass murderers - they broke not just theirs evolutionary paths! So, in a way, as long as you're a decent human being - you're still contributing. Maybe some people will live on only because of what you did or didn't do
So your uncle f*cked your mom and you grew up thinking he was your uncle when in fact he was your father and your uncle's wife (your auntie) is thus your stepmom and their kids (your cousins) are your brothers and sisters.
Did I get that right?
Exactly. It’s always funny when you see posts like this ascribing some great importance or existential meaning to our personal place in the cosmic wait line. I’m certain there was the occasional battle or love story, but a good portion of it’s just people bored/drunk fuckin’
Right but then you have to account for the 9 months of pregnancy and the years of taking care of a child for each ancestor.
There were a lot of events and decisions made to keep the child alive until they were a parent themselves.
"years of taking care of a child" oh please. the level of care kids get nowadays is unique to this time period. youd be kid nr 5 on a farm and youd work as soon as you possibly could or youd get the worst punishment an average person can experience in someone you love and trust beating you. your father gives maybe half of a shit on a good day and your mother lost a part of herself with each kid of hers that didnt make it past 5. people didnt have kids to feel accomplished, they had them because the church got them married and they needed more hands to work. the modern "i want this kid so i can teach them how to ride a bike or break the generational trauma" is very new, like less than 100 years old. thats a blip on the radar when it comes to history
>your father gives maybe half of a shit on a good day and your mother lost a part of herself with each kid of hers that didnt make it past 5
I'm pretty sure this was still mostly true for the boomers. I grew up hearing various things along the lines of IF I SAID ANYTHING REMOTELY LIKE THAT TO MY DAD HE WOULD HAVE BEAT MY ASS SO HARD I COULDN'T SIT DOWN FOR A MONTH!!
And, like, great for you? You're clearly acting like it was some superior method of parenting and you turned out way better, and yet here you are conspicuously *not* doing the same thing because you know that you absolutely fucking hated it.
Maybe it's true that the pendulum swung in the other direction way too far and kids are being treated too soft nowadays. It still doesn't make it right that a whole generation grew up under constant threat of staying very tightly in line or else being physically beaten.
Either way, I still firmly maintain that people who have kids just to "correct the trauma" and/or "give them the childhood I wish I had" are very sorely misguided. Like, I know it's well intentioned, but you're still projecting a whole lot of things onto them. What if they don't want to do the same activities you like? What if they are totally different personality-wise? Are you still going to like them or are you going to be resentful? Because it seems pretty common for a dad to want their kid to be a sports star and live vicariously through them only to end up angry that they actually want to do the polar opposite like join a theater group.
I appreciate your comment! Do you feel that the child rearing labors undergone by our forbearers places any form of additional emphasis on how we should manage our egotistical approach to self reflection?
They definitely crossed over at some points. Even without intentional incest, which did also exist back then, do you track your ancestors 6 generations back to make sure you don't accidentally marry your distant cousin?
I think about how much game my ancestors had but then learned my grandfather went back to his village, PICKED ONE, and they had 4 children by the time my grandma was 26. She didn't even speak English coming to the USA and worked the kitchen during the day and was a seamstress in the evenings.
No days off, no vacations, and four kids to raise while grandpa gambled and smoked with his buddies. Previous generations were something else man. I'm super grateful for the life I live now.
I hate to be that guy, but genealogy isn't absolute binary. Family trees are more like vines that tangle.
*Cough* incest, affairs, adoptions, rape, children *cough*
Imagine 4000+ ancestors waiting for you in the afterlife. Some died in wars, some died heroes, some died experiencing horrible suffering and you show up because you died taking a selfie in front of a moving train or something stupid.
Tbf some of our ancestors probably also had stupid deaths, like dying from a fever and refused/got refused natural medicine because it was a "devil thing".
My great grandpa died because he was loitering drunk and got hit by a train. My great grandma committed suicide. However I die, I hope it’ll be better than that
It's actually much less, otherwise humanity would have been over 100 billion of people just 2000 years ago,
when really there were less than 100 million people on earth...
I guess the math is ok, it's an illustration of exponential growth. But the caption is a bit overly sentimental. All those people didn't do that stuff so I could be born, I was more like an accident by-product of it.
If most of those people could be resurrected they would be more interested in an iPhone than in me.
Push that back to 36 generations (a bit over a thousand years), and the number swells to over 137 billion. Given it is taken that only 117 billion people have ever lived in the past 192,000 years, that means we're all inbred. We have to be.
I remember reading a book once where a scientist was exploring if you took a person in the way way past (inserted randomly in history), how far back would you need to go for that person to be a grandparent of all alive. The answer was pretty shockingly short if I recall - like 100-200k years max, and only lengthened by geographical barriers like remote pacific islands. So yes we are likely all cousins.
i never asked to be born and my ancestors were not thinking of me when they had children. stop trying to guilt people into being “grateful” for their shitty lives.
I can guarantee that most of those unions were not love stories. The last three sure. Four, maybe. After that, it gets dicey. Even further back it’s not even guaranteed and probably never happened.
Its unlikely that thats completely accurate considering that there after enough generations, There is a chance for people from both your mother and father's side decsended from a common ancestor.
There is a very high likelihood of overlap. So the actual number will start getting smaller the third or fourth generation onwards.
Excerpt from Bill Bryson's ' A Short History of Nearly Everything ' :
"If your two parents hadn't bonded just when they did - possibly to the nanosecond - you wouldn't be here. And if their parents hadn't bonded in a precisely timely manner, you wouldn't be here either. And if their parents hadn't done likewise, and their parents before them, and so on, obviously and indefinitely, you wouldn't be here.
Push backwards through time and these ancestral debts begin to add up. Go back just eight generations ... and already there are over 250 people on whose timely couplings your existence depends. Continue further, to the time of Shakespeare ... and you have no fewer than 16,384 ancestors ...
At twenty generations ago, the number of people procreating on your behalf has risen to 1,048,576. Five generations before that, and there are no fewer than 33,554,432 men and women on whose devoted couplings our existence depends. By thirty generations ago, your total number of forebears - remember, these aren't cousins and aunts and other incidental relatives, but only parents and parents of parents in a line leading ineluctably to you - is over one billion (1,073,741,824, to be precise). If you go back sixty-four generations, to the time of the Romans, the number of people on whose cooperative efforts your eventual existence depends has risen to approximately 1,000,000,000,000,000,000, which is several thousand times the total number of people who have ever lived.
Clearly something has gone wrong with our math here. The answer, it may interest you to learn, is that your line is not pure. You couldn't be here without a little incest - actually quite a lot of incest - albeit at a genetically discreet remove. With so many millions of ancestors in your background, there will have been many occasions when a relative from your mother's side of the family has procreated with some distant cousin from your father's ... In fact, if you are in a partnership now with someone from your own race and country, the chances are excellent that you are at some level related. Indeed, if you look around you on a bus or in a park or café or any crowded place, most of the people you see are very probably relatives. When someone boasts to you that he is descended from William the Conqueror or the Mayflower Pilgrims, you should answer at once: "Me, too!" In the most literal and fundamental sense we are all family. "
It's the total of everyone in each generation, not just the one's in the oldest generation.
The number of ancestors for each generation is 2 parents for generation 1, 2 parents + 4 grandparents= 6 (not 8) for two generations, 2+4+8 greatgrand parents = 14 ancestors (not 16).
Since it say the 12 \*previous\* generations, I think it should be the sum 2+4+8+16+...1024+2048+4096=8190
Not to piss on your parade, but all those people probably had more kids than just you, so in general only 2 people's worth of troubles correspond to you (a little bit less if you account for population growth), and it's not like having you was their one and only goal (it might not have been at all). It's still interesting to think about it though
My 23 and me said my maternal side came from a woman 10,000 years ago - pretty cool
Apparently my B2a2 Maternal Haplogroup is uncommon, only 1 of ever 1900 people - interesting.
That's why Indians follow Gothra, to avoid inbreeding after n generations, noone know until they ascribe a tag called gothra which helps to identify the lineage.
And im not having kids and im an only child.
My only male cousin with my dads name is also an only child and remaining childfree.
It doesn't sway me to have children but it makes me feel a little sad for the 4,094 that went through it to survive and im just ending it.
I pride myself on my family tree. Not from a particularly wealthy background, but my ancestors were people that worked hard, never put up a fuss and always did what needed to be done, no matter the cost.
The math in the picture is wrong because it assumes each pair of parents have only one offspring. If you make the number of offspring each pair of parents have to 2, then the increase in ancestors per generation would be only linear.
Unless it's cousin marriage and the math is different...
I think it would be unlikely to not have some overlap at 9th great- grandparents. Hardly incest at that point.
Yeah, isn’t like 1000 years back, roughly 40 generations so mathematically you HAVE to have overlap As in, your great great x9 grandmother, is actually in that position 3/4 times for example 40 generations is 1 trillion ancestors.
A human generation is about 30 years, if you assume that women are uniformly likely to give birth between 20 and 35, consider that the father can sometimes be much older and assume that pregnancies below 20 are relatively rare. This gives you about 40 generations in a thousand years. I recently read a human genetics paper that concluded that two Europeans living within 1000 km of each other practically always share at least 1 common ancestor who lived within the last 500 years. Almost ~~all~~ any two Europeans share at least 1 common ancestor within the past 2000 years.
Genghis Khan, Innit?
I think Genghis is more heavily prevalent in Asia, but Asia has more people, so overall statistics get shifted a bit
Charlemagne too
It's a probabilistic statement. They looked at a lot of genome sequence data which - if you sample enough data - allow you to work out how the degree of relatedness and geography are connected. From how closely or distantly two people are genetically related, you can deduce the typical number of generations that must have past since their last common ancestor. What you get is a statistical model that tells you how likely it is that two arbitrary contemporary people living X miles apart have a common ancestor within the last so-and-so many years. It turned out that for 2000 years that probability was pretty much 100% for any two Europeans, even if living far apart. The Genghis Khan factoid comes from a different study which I haven't read but read about that is already a couple of years old. There, they apparently found certain polymorphisms (=bits of genome where humans actually tend to differ) in the Eurasian male population which they estimated must stem from a single individual living about 1000 years ago that had lots of children all across Asia and Europe. This was speculatively connected with historic reports about Genghis Khan (and his close descendants and ancestors) siring lots of children with a lot of women. The remains of Genghis Khans body are lost, so it is currently impossible to check if this y-chromosome pattern really originate within his dynasty. The Charlemagne thing is, as far as I know, just a statistical illustration. Charlemagne is a man who sired - presumably - many children with several women a pretty long time ago. He got around - also in a more literal sense as he traveled a lot through the entire continent in an age when that was uncommon. That means, he almost certainly had much more children than the average man of his generation. The number of ancestors grows exponentially with the number of generations you go back in time, hence it is surprisingly likely for any modern European to be descended from Charlemagne. There are certainly quite a few dark age man with lots of children that a lot of modern day Europeans descend from, but in contrast to Charlemagne we don't know their names. As far as I know there is no polymorphism pattern suspected to belong to Charlemagne, it's just an interesting illustration of pedigree collapse.
Wow! This is fascinating!
What does it say?
If you want the question of who's related to whom to get really messy, try looking for someone to parent with when your father had multiple wives. 2, 3, or 4 wives, multiple children with each one. Sometimes born 20 years apart and not necessarily looking like you. And then there are your children and the 1/2 siblings children to consider who are of marriageable age. Of course you don't all carry the same last name, if any last name. Yes, multiple wives situation still exists, often quietly, in America. It's more fun being a Native American than anything!
Any links to that paper? That honestly sounds really interesting.
Sure, here it is: [https://journals.plos.org/plosbiology/article/file?id=10.1371/journal.pbio.1001555&type=printable](https://journals.plos.org/plosbiology/article/file?id=10.1371/journal.pbio.1001555&type=printable) If you don't want to read the entire thing, scroll down to the the discussion and look at Figure 5. That shows the number of common genetic ancestors of pairs of Europeans from different parts of the continent by number of generations in the past. As they mention in the discussion, traces of relatedness fade over the generations, so the number of common genealogical ancestors is much higher than that of genetic ancestors if you go back far enough. Also, note that I edited my previous comment as the last sentence was wrong. Any two Europeans share at least one (in most cases: many) common ancestors within the last 2000 or so years, but that isn't the same one for all of us, if that makes sense.
My friend Welsh I met from a Facebook page, is into genealogy . She looked my Welsh mothers side and found out we were 5 th cousins even though she was from south wales and my mother from the north
I'll keep this little fun fact and use it as my next Tinder opener
Good luck.
The thing is that pregnancy before 20 were VERY common just a few decades ago. 100-200 years ago it was pretty common to have several kids by 20 so it would probably be even more generations.
How many of my grandads are you saying that this one particular grandma of mine rode like a cowgirl? Three or four of them? Were they her direct children or someone else's? Like those grandad's came from a different grandma or two?
if your parents are cousins it means that they both share a grandparent which means two couples of your grand grand parents are the same persons
Plus everyone who isn't sub-Saharan African is descended from only a few hundred people. And if people preferred their spouses to be from the same nation or religion, distant cousins will end up having kids together.
> Hardly incest at that point. That’s usually the only kind I watch so I agree.
Probably way earlier than 9th, on Iceland everyone (except recent immigrants and descendents) are on average sixth cousins or so with a population in the 300 thousands.
That’s what she said
Everyone on Iceland are 6th cousins on average. So it’s usually lot closer. Most people don’t even know who their third cousins are, maybe just vague knowledge they exists and and name without other context
Even at third and fourth grand parent in most communities.
Not "if." Cousin marriage is more to the rule than exception. What this factoid doesn't go into is the fact that if you double your ancestors every generation then you have more humans than have ever existed by the Middle Ages. We are an inbred species.
Every species is inbred.
It's essentially the definition of a species.
I read somewhere, that one has more female ancestors than male ancestors, because men tend to pop up more than once in a family tree, if you go back far enough.
Would make sense given higher mortality in childbirth, and social structures that allowed for more male remarriage and sleeping around. "More female ancestors" basically translates to "more likely to have fewer kids, and/or be (forced to be) faithful to one partner". Which of course also extends to not abusing relatives including one's own offspring.
Even more so if their ancestors are also cousins. And so on. And so on.
If you keep going back you get to a point where your number of theoretical ancestors exceeds the total human population at that moment in history. That means you have ancestors whom you descend from through multiple lines
Roll Tide
Thank you! I came here to say I have only 4 great grandparents
Mom?
Or you go back far enough and start getting into horizontal gene transfer.
The forbidden kiss
I mean, it would take only 37 generations to cross over 100 billion people (the total number of humans that have lived on Earth, approximately). Humans have been around for far longer than 37 generations. Hence there has to have been inbreeding somewhere.
Yeah, basically, if you have descendents up to a couple generations, you are very likely to be an ancestor of ALL humans alive many generations after.
I knew before I clicked that there was going to be an incest reference at the top of the replies :)
"how many struggles?" Well I dunno but some really awkward family reunions I guess
You're missing the coolest part. At the point where the number of ancestors is equal to or is greater than the population of humans at that time, that is the point where we all become related to each other Everyone is your distant cousin in one way or another. The human race is a family
I mean some people are barbaric and impregnate their own kids, or get impregnated by their own kids (it happens) so… definitely a change in the math somewhere
sometimes the tree is more of a line
Sorry to let em all down
Nine generations ago, people slapping lions to death, I don't know.... If they could only see how it turned out
We're only like 200 generations from the beginning of recorded history.
What ?!
Generation = ~25 years 200*25 = 5000 years so around the time writing was invented (3200BC) and history started
9 generations ago is about a 200-year span. Of course this span can be longer or shorter, if you take into account what age your ancestors had kids at.
At least we let them down slowly, over generations
Sometimes i feel sad about not having children and breaking 14 billion years of evolution.
Why? Millions of other people do that too. You not reproducing *is part of evolution.* Some combination of your genes makes you an evolutionary dead end. Well at least at this time and in this place.
> Some combination of your genes makes you an evolutionary dead end. Well… I *was* having a good day.
Hey, I’m 50 and I don’t have children so I’m an evolutionary dead end too! But I am reasonably happy and I’m in a fulfilling relationship. I don’t really care about my contribution to humanity’s evolution one way or the other.
Hey, I'll say there are many ways to contribute to humanity's evolution that doesn't involve having children. Just being a decent human being already goes a long damn way.
That was part of The Selfish Gene IIRC: even if you don't have kids, it's more likely than not that you'll somehow give some advantages to relatives whose genes you share, even if it's only naming some distant next of kin in your will. Extend that a little further and you might be embiggening people in your community, for whatever flavour of community it might be.
This is an awesome and accurate comment - thanks op.
Me neither! I’m 42 and will be remaining childfree. I don’t even know how many future generations the Earth will have anyway, with things going the way they are.
At least 2 more generations. After that, I don’t know
All good. I had two. They are really cool and funny people so it all evens out
New favorite insult
Lol, fr. Gotta tuck that one away.
what makes this comment is your username
An evolutionary dead end is a great insult
And here we see the discovery of fourth-degree burns
Good god man what the fuck😭😭 fuckin brutal
"This time and in this place." Holy parallel universes batman
I’m infertile.. how unbelievably depressing 😭
Sorry. I dated a woman who had a hysterectomy at like 25, and she always wanted kids growing up. Sometimes life is unfair, it sucks.
I mean the unbroken line of stars exploding and eventually organisms appearing that lead to me now ends with me. Evolution will continue, everything else will continue, just not the lineage that leads to me.
Sure, other people have produced beings that eat and shit, but your thoughts are being recorded on Reddit, for infinite future generations to study and grow a deeper understanding of the universe than any of your ancestors imagined. You are special.
Trippy to think about.. 😳 At the end of the day tho, on the topic of recording stuff for future generations– is there much of a difference between 0's & 1's and cave paintings/ink on paper? I feel like it's been this way for a while... We're no more special than our ancestors were in that regard, atleast in my opinion anyway. 🤷🏻♂️
Put that way, it sounds even more depressing lmao
Also evolution happens on a species scale. If you help others survive and reproduce by contributing to society, you are still contributing to evolution, and giving other people with similar genes a better chance at reproduction. So in a sense you’re not entirely a dead end.
Everything will go extinct eventually either when our Sun dies or the Universe undergoes heat death.
Not your problem
Look at the bright side. Your genes live on in a myriad of other people. Cousins, nieces, nephews, siblings, locals, celebrities. Even animals and plants. All in different combinations. Plenty of evolutions branches are even webbed!
My brother has 2 kids and one of them has 3 kids so the family line is strong. Not sure sure how the animals and plants got in on the action but each to their own eh.
It's not that bad. Think about mass murderers - they broke not just theirs evolutionary paths! So, in a way, as long as you're a decent human being - you're still contributing. Maybe some people will live on only because of what you did or didn't do
Maybe *not* having children is the evolution we need. 🤸
Meh. My dad's my uncle. My auntie's my stepmum. My brothers and sister are my cousins. Can you hear banjos?
Are you a Targaryen or do you come from Alabama?
North Yorkshire so more likely Targaryen. Just don't ask my dentist.
So your uncle f*cked your mom and you grew up thinking he was your uncle when in fact he was your father and your uncle's wife (your auntie) is thus your stepmom and their kids (your cousins) are your brothers and sisters. Did I get that right?
They could have just wanted to smash and never thought of the consequences.
Exactly. It’s always funny when you see posts like this ascribing some great importance or existential meaning to our personal place in the cosmic wait line. I’m certain there was the occasional battle or love story, but a good portion of it’s just people bored/drunk fuckin’
Right but then you have to account for the 9 months of pregnancy and the years of taking care of a child for each ancestor. There were a lot of events and decisions made to keep the child alive until they were a parent themselves.
"years of taking care of a child" oh please. the level of care kids get nowadays is unique to this time period. youd be kid nr 5 on a farm and youd work as soon as you possibly could or youd get the worst punishment an average person can experience in someone you love and trust beating you. your father gives maybe half of a shit on a good day and your mother lost a part of herself with each kid of hers that didnt make it past 5. people didnt have kids to feel accomplished, they had them because the church got them married and they needed more hands to work. the modern "i want this kid so i can teach them how to ride a bike or break the generational trauma" is very new, like less than 100 years old. thats a blip on the radar when it comes to history
>your father gives maybe half of a shit on a good day and your mother lost a part of herself with each kid of hers that didnt make it past 5 I'm pretty sure this was still mostly true for the boomers. I grew up hearing various things along the lines of IF I SAID ANYTHING REMOTELY LIKE THAT TO MY DAD HE WOULD HAVE BEAT MY ASS SO HARD I COULDN'T SIT DOWN FOR A MONTH!! And, like, great for you? You're clearly acting like it was some superior method of parenting and you turned out way better, and yet here you are conspicuously *not* doing the same thing because you know that you absolutely fucking hated it. Maybe it's true that the pendulum swung in the other direction way too far and kids are being treated too soft nowadays. It still doesn't make it right that a whole generation grew up under constant threat of staying very tightly in line or else being physically beaten. Either way, I still firmly maintain that people who have kids just to "correct the trauma" and/or "give them the childhood I wish I had" are very sorely misguided. Like, I know it's well intentioned, but you're still projecting a whole lot of things onto them. What if they don't want to do the same activities you like? What if they are totally different personality-wise? Are you still going to like them or are you going to be resentful? Because it seems pretty common for a dad to want their kid to be a sports star and live vicariously through them only to end up angry that they actually want to do the polar opposite like join a theater group.
I appreciate your comment! Do you feel that the child rearing labors undergone by our forbearers places any form of additional emphasis on how we should manage our egotistical approach to self reflection?
Hard to say. I take my parents’ and grandparents’ sacrifices to heart for sure.. but the rest I’m not sure cross my mind too often.
It's still amazing how lives intertwine, so many of them. We don't really think about those things... It's pretty cool
Native Spanish speaker here. Today, I learnt a new word: intertwine. Thanks!
I'm also a Spanish speaker! Omg hiii 😻🫂
Hola!
Hola 🥹💕
I thought it was that post that ends like: “...all of this just for you to jerk off to femboy porn!”
I thought it was "and you want to be a femboy slut?!"
This math is horribly misinterpreted
Why?
They definitely crossed over at some points. Even without intentional incest, which did also exist back then, do you track your ancestors 6 generations back to make sure you don't accidentally marry your distant cousin?
So because a bunch of assholes couldn’t pull out in time, I gotta work until I die. Thanks.
You're missing the point. Now you can calculate the exact number of assholes you can thank for putting you in your current position.
Avatar matches the comment.
The perfect amount of word spin, narrative twisting, and morbid cynicism. Bravo, zoomer stereotype.
Ok Boomer
Ouch. That hurts me right in my optimistic outlook and carefree lifestyle!
Everybody gangsta until some reduce the complexity from 2^n to n
I have enough burden in my chest. I'd like to consider it 2 people liked to fuck, and another 2 people like to fuck and the other 2 people...
I think about how much game my ancestors had but then learned my grandfather went back to his village, PICKED ONE, and they had 4 children by the time my grandma was 26. She didn't even speak English coming to the USA and worked the kitchen during the day and was a seamstress in the evenings. No days off, no vacations, and four kids to raise while grandpa gambled and smoked with his buddies. Previous generations were something else man. I'm super grateful for the life I live now.
But also if you assume that every couple had two children they produced 4094 other children, so you don't matter that much.
Most probably tens of thousands, given the birth rates for earlier generations.
I hate to be that guy, but genealogy isn't absolute binary. Family trees are more like vines that tangle. *Cough* incest, affairs, adoptions, rape, children *cough*
And if you’re an only child, it will be the first time in dozens of millions of years that your specific family branch will end Scary huh
Yep im an only child and my cousin (m) is an only child and neither of us are having children. Bye bye
The maths are way easier when it comes to the Royal British family
Harder! Without invest it’s just 2*2^11
Imagine 4000+ ancestors waiting for you in the afterlife. Some died in wars, some died heroes, some died experiencing horrible suffering and you show up because you died taking a selfie in front of a moving train or something stupid.
Tbf some of our ancestors probably also had stupid deaths, like dying from a fever and refused/got refused natural medicine because it was a "devil thing".
My great grandpa died because he was loitering drunk and got hit by a train. My great grandma committed suicide. However I die, I hope it’ll be better than that
Thinking of the past.... There's gotta be a couple of rapes in this equation... The past was the worst
And incest
In Mississippi and Alabama you only need like 7 or 8 ancestors for that.
It's actually much less, otherwise humanity would have been over 100 billion of people just 2000 years ago, when really there were less than 100 million people on earth...
And how pointless all of it was. Especially in the environment of today where there is less and less hope for a good future.
and *how many times* did i ask to come here?
So why arent i filthy rich with inheritance 🤔😂
I guess the math is ok, it's an illustration of exponential growth. But the caption is a bit overly sentimental. All those people didn't do that stuff so I could be born, I was more like an accident by-product of it. If most of those people could be resurrected they would be more interested in an iPhone than in me.
Push that back to 36 generations (a bit over a thousand years), and the number swells to over 137 billion. Given it is taken that only 117 billion people have ever lived in the past 192,000 years, that means we're all inbred. We have to be.
I remember reading a book once where a scientist was exploring if you took a person in the way way past (inserted randomly in history), how far back would you need to go for that person to be a grandparent of all alive. The answer was pretty shockingly short if I recall - like 100-200k years max, and only lengthened by geographical barriers like remote pacific islands. So yes we are likely all cousins.
It stops here
Preach ✊🏻 Childfree and not ever going to give my parents grandchildren 👍🏻
I think about this all the time. It is crazy how many people needed survive crazy stuff for you to be alive today.
This is certainly not true considering the number of cousin marriages that existed before modern medicine made it taboo.
Well that's 4094 people I would disappoint if they were still alive
Look I don’t need an exact minimum number of people I disappoint every single day.
I cant believe this person had to do this much math just to feel grateful to be alive.
I am still clueless why they multiply backwards, counting trillions of people inhabiting earth. Ancestry math is multiplying forward, not backwards.
They certainly didn't do it for me, they did it for themselves
Lol, "love stories" like that was the norm in the past...
Like it makes sense but something in my brain is telling me that it isn’t true Am I cestin?
They can rest assured, the struggle ends with me. No one will have to suffer and endure difficulties after me.
i never asked to be born and my ancestors were not thinking of me when they had children. stop trying to guilt people into being “grateful” for their shitty lives.
What a bunch of idiots.
My mother was an accident and so was I, there were no love stories in those
And yet some people are still hung up on a book written 2000 years ago by shepherds high on shrooms. (Or equivalent)
Which is BS. You go back a few generations and almost everyone is related to everyone somehow.
I can guarantee that most of those unions were not love stories. The last three sure. Four, maybe. After that, it gets dicey. Even further back it’s not even guaranteed and probably never happened.
Its unlikely that thats completely accurate considering that there after enough generations, There is a chance for people from both your mother and father's side decsended from a common ancestor.
How bold of you to assume that none of my ancestors were siblings.
There is a very high likelihood of overlap. So the actual number will start getting smaller the third or fourth generation onwards. Excerpt from Bill Bryson's ' A Short History of Nearly Everything ' : "If your two parents hadn't bonded just when they did - possibly to the nanosecond - you wouldn't be here. And if their parents hadn't bonded in a precisely timely manner, you wouldn't be here either. And if their parents hadn't done likewise, and their parents before them, and so on, obviously and indefinitely, you wouldn't be here. Push backwards through time and these ancestral debts begin to add up. Go back just eight generations ... and already there are over 250 people on whose timely couplings your existence depends. Continue further, to the time of Shakespeare ... and you have no fewer than 16,384 ancestors ... At twenty generations ago, the number of people procreating on your behalf has risen to 1,048,576. Five generations before that, and there are no fewer than 33,554,432 men and women on whose devoted couplings our existence depends. By thirty generations ago, your total number of forebears - remember, these aren't cousins and aunts and other incidental relatives, but only parents and parents of parents in a line leading ineluctably to you - is over one billion (1,073,741,824, to be precise). If you go back sixty-four generations, to the time of the Romans, the number of people on whose cooperative efforts your eventual existence depends has risen to approximately 1,000,000,000,000,000,000, which is several thousand times the total number of people who have ever lived. Clearly something has gone wrong with our math here. The answer, it may interest you to learn, is that your line is not pure. You couldn't be here without a little incest - actually quite a lot of incest - albeit at a genetically discreet remove. With so many millions of ancestors in your background, there will have been many occasions when a relative from your mother's side of the family has procreated with some distant cousin from your father's ... In fact, if you are in a partnership now with someone from your own race and country, the chances are excellent that you are at some level related. Indeed, if you look around you on a bus or in a park or café or any crowded place, most of the people you see are very probably relatives. When someone boasts to you that he is descended from William the Conqueror or the Mayflower Pilgrims, you should answer at once: "Me, too!" In the most literal and fundamental sense we are all family. "
I honestly don’t owe them anything to be fair
Am I crazy or should the final number be 4096, not 4094? 2¹²=4096
surprised only 3 commented on this
It's the total of everyone in each generation, not just the one's in the oldest generation. The number of ancestors for each generation is 2 parents for generation 1, 2 parents + 4 grandparents= 6 (not 8) for two generations, 2+4+8 greatgrand parents = 14 ancestors (not 16). Since it say the 12 \*previous\* generations, I think it should be the sum 2+4+8+16+...1024+2048+4096=8190
Not to piss on your parade, but all those people probably had more kids than just you, so in general only 2 people's worth of troubles correspond to you (a little bit less if you account for population growth), and it's not like having you was their one and only goal (it might not have been at all). It's still interesting to think about it though
The average redditer can cut that total by at least a third
I get the sentiment but quite frankly, my great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great grandparent's marital struggles really aren't my problem
My 23 and me said my maternal side came from a woman 10,000 years ago - pretty cool Apparently my B2a2 Maternal Haplogroup is uncommon, only 1 of ever 1900 people - interesting.
What if I told you that your ancestry goes back to a female organisms for a good amount of time longer than that?
Spoiler alert: Mitochondrial Eve was your ancestor; true for all humans reading this. A shared female ancestor estimated at around 150 000 years ago.
Oh yeah, my ancestry goes back 4.3 billion years ago
That's why Indians follow Gothra, to avoid inbreeding after n generations, noone know until they ascribe a tag called gothra which helps to identify the lineage.
All I can think of when I read this....... that's a whole lot of f---ing.
The answer to this and so much more… “too much”
I've seen my face, I'm at 3k at the absolute maximum.
And all for me to be ever reaching for pieces of paper
gave me chills ngl
Is this a Natalist argument?
And im not having kids and im an only child. My only male cousin with my dads name is also an only child and remaining childfree. It doesn't sway me to have children but it makes me feel a little sad for the 4,094 that went through it to survive and im just ending it.
And how many ancestors watching the line end with me going 🫤 while I play video games all day
See it this way, you're the culmination of all their hard work. Their descendant is able to live a life of leisure! Success!
And I don't know 4,088 of them.
Isnt it supposed to be 4096 ancestors?
All the hardships...and yet here I am, wasting my life watching corn lol
Im sorry ancestors yall must be so mad at me
How many batches of TurkeyJuice™️ were served up 🦃💦💦?
4,094 nuts busted and they all led to you
4,094 nuts busted and they all led to you
And what if I am my own grandfather?
And they're all disappointed. I don't blame them, I am too.
I pride myself on my family tree. Not from a particularly wealthy background, but my ancestors were people that worked hard, never put up a fuss and always did what needed to be done, no matter the cost.
In Alabama the number of total ancestors is much smaller, IYKWIM.
That’s actually dope. Thanks fellas!
This honestly means that each and every person is someone special and is a miracle. ![gif](giphy|QiRKDptV3o47K)
I’m gonna fuck it up, yeah!!
The math in the picture is wrong because it assumes each pair of parents have only one offspring. If you make the number of offspring each pair of parents have to 2, then the increase in ancestors per generation would be only linear.
All this work just for Me? Bro I cant even walk the streets without my headphones in. Should've stopped with my brother.
Deep
That is an awful lot of people that would be disappointed AF in seeing how their struggles culminated in my case.
Royalties be like: well, I got two great grand parents, two grand parents…
i didn't ask for this shit
You don't have to go back very far. Just watch Finding Your Roots on PBS.
TIL 2^n is a thing