How do you explain this..?

Question

Every person has 2 parents,4 grand parents, 8 great-grandparents, 16-great great grand parents, 32 great-great-great grandparens and so on. If that is true and a new generation is introduced about every 25 years that would mean that a child born today would have had 549,755,813,888 ancestors alive about 24 generations (or 1000 years) ago. The estimated world population around 1008 A.D. was only 254,000,000.

How is the first statement above true given the rest of the above paragraph? Also, would that mean that each and everyone of us is related?

Answer 1

Before 1800 many people married their cousins.

Imagine an island with just 100 people, 50 men, 50 women. Everyone marries once. Everyoe has just two children, a boy and a girl, due to birth control. Everyone marries at age 20 and dies at age 40. The population would never get to be more than 200 and after a few generations everyone woud be married to a cousin of some degree - first, second or third.

That "island" is remarkably like many small villages in Humankind's past, except instead of birth control you have plague, wolves, barbarian invaders, mistakes, accidents and so forth; each couple has more than 2 kids, but they die before they become adults. Also, the numbers are more ragged in the villages than on my mythical island.

Answer 2

Insest. Young death. No childeren

And I do believe that everyone is realted but just in a really really distant way.

Answer 3

many people reproduced with brothers, sisters, and children.

Answer 4

People die, and perhaps

Answer 5

The first statement is true if and only if some ancestors are duplicates. Some would have to be repeated in our pedigree because we cannot have more ancestors than have ever lived on earth. So the math shows that some duplicates decrease the actual number of different people but we still have that many ancestors just a few repeats decrease the number of different people.

Say we had the same GGG-grandfather on mothers side and GG-grandfather on fathers side. That would decrease the number of different ancestors by a huge number because all of their ancestors on both sides of the family would all duplicate also. This is much easier to draw than explain, I hope you understand.

We are all related much closer than we imagine, but not always within 24 generations as the math suggests. Because people live in different location that didn't see each other till more recently.

Answer 6

This is why we are all related.  At some point in time, the number of ancestors you have will exceed the population of the planet.  Therefore, it is impossible for those ancestors to each be different individuals.  You descend from many people multiple times.  Example:  I am a descendant of King Edward III at least 4 different ways.  On one line he is my 22nd great-grandfather, on another my 23rd, on another my 24th and on another my 25th.  I am a descendant of 4 of his kids.

According the the chart at the website below, for the average person born in 1940, their 44th great-grandparents lived in about 790 AD and they had over 70 trillion 44-great-grandparents.  Not possible mathematically considering the world population in 790 AD was not 70 trillion.  So, it is not the number of people, it is the number of slots or positions on the family tree.  The same person can fit into several slots on the family tree.  And the further back in time you go, the more positions an individual will take up in your family tree.

http://surnameroundup.com/boniface/gener...