>From: "Dee" <deedovey@rica.net> >To: "Dan Hamrick" <dhamrick@neo.rr.com> >Subject: Re: [WVPioneers] Intermarriage >Date: Fri, Aug 4, 2000, 11:42 AM > >Here is information about genealogy lineage facts which I got from >the book "River Out of Eden" which you might find interesting. > > You have two parents, four grandparents, eight great-grandparents >and so on. With every generation the number of your ancestors >doubles. Go back g generations and the number of your ancestors is 2 >multiplied by itself g times: 2 to the power g. If we assume, >conservatively, four generations per century - that is that people >breed on average at the age of twenty-five, and we travel back 2000 >years we will have 80 generations. Are you following me so far? Two >multiplied by itself 80 times is 1,209,000,000,000,000,000,000,000. >The formula shows that you had a million million million million >ancestors who were contemporaries of Jesus and so did I. Mind >boggling >isn't it? > >But we know the total population of the world at that time was just >a fraction >of a negligible fraction of the number of ancestors we have just >calculated. Where the formula leads us astray is that it assumes that >we each have >eight great-grandparents, but inbreeding - cousins marrying cousins >etc - will give us less than that. And it happened often enough >throughout human history to make a big difference. Cousins includes >second cousins, fifth cousins, fifteenth cousins and so forth, and >when >you count cousins as distant as that every marriage is a marriage >between cousins. The author says that you sometimes hear people >boasting about being a distant cousin of the Queen of England, but it >is rather pompous of them because we are all distant cousins of the >Queen, and of everybody else for that matter, in more ways than can >ever be traced. > >