Are all human beings, literally cousins in some way?

Question

I have first cousins. I have second and third cousins. I also know my 1st cousins once removed and even my 3rd cousins twice removed.

But are we all technically, literally, cousins?

Could I be your 1288th cousin 99 times removed?

Answer 1

Yep, and if Ms Informed is guessing, she's guessing well.

I saw a TV program a while back where they took a Black English guy, a Japanese guy and a French guy and went through their DNA to find matching strings which indicated common ancestry at some point. Remarkably, the Black English guy and the French bloke had shared genetic material well within the previous 10 generations. To match up all three guys took a little longer with the Asian gent, but it was still within 10,000 years - a remarkably short time. Since they suggested the results are indeed indicative of a wider truth, yes, we're all cousins, and although related only distantly now, we certainly were closely related at some point in our history.

Answer 2

Absolutely. If you look at pure numbers, everyone on the planet has two parents (okay, brothers and sisters share the same parents), and each of those parents had two parents of their own, and each of theirs...and so on. If all those people were completely unrelated, then you get into the realm of trillions of people having existed just a few generations back. This is, of course, ridiculous. There's a whole lot of incest in everyone's family history, albeit distantly-related incest (one hopes). Your mother and father are related by ways other than marriage, as were their parents, and their parents...

We all trace our lineage back to a very small population of humans, perhaps just 10,000 individuals or less, during the Late Pliestocene era about 100,000 years ago. The population of Homo sapiens was driven to the brink of extinction, perhaps by drought, perhaps by volcanic winter. The lack of genetic diversity in humans (99.9% similarity between superficially unrelated people), as well as tracing mutation patterns "migrating" around the world, is evidence of this population bottleneck.

Before that we trace our lineage back further to some other tribe/group of primates and our most recent common ancestors some 200,000 years ago.

Answer 3

Yeah we're all related.

If you're religious, we all came from Adam and Eve, and if not, well......

We all have some ancient monkey-like thing as our greatx1000000000000000000 grandpa.

So nice to meet you my 1288th cousin 99 times removed.

Answer 4

they say there was some kind of catestrophic event that reduced modern human populations down to as little as a few thousand individuals...so yes, we are all "related"