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You beat me to it! Many of those 40 million have no descendants, too.
I think pedigree collapse is also being underestimated. People in the year 1000 may never have traveled more than ten miles from their homes. Villages would have the same families intermarrying for generations.
I think you are wrong about that.
Many people in the Middle Ages moved from their home villages and married people in far away places...
I think you all are overestimating pedigree collapse.
Pedigree collapse is an important factor, but our family trees always "escape" to unexpected places at some point.
All that takes for a "escape" like that is some adventurous ancestor who traveled from far away to join your family. That ancestor will have a totally different tree "behind" him.
There was a lot of inbreeding in the past, but all villages always got an "outsider" from times to times...
The Mongol Empire of Genghis Khan, for example, is probably a source of "adventurous" ancestors in the family trees of many people in Europe. Many people in the aristocracy of Eastern Europe got maried to the aristocracy of the Mongol Empire...
Even if you don't have any detectable trace left in your DNA, you still may have a branch of your family tree coming from the Mongol Empire.
"There weren’t even 4.3 trillion people on the planet in the 1350s, the number was much closer to 430 million, only one tenth the number of people we’d need to fill spaces in our 32nd generation of our pedigree. So even if the entire population of the world at that time was one “generation” and an equal ancestor, they’d each have to appear 10 times. This is a pedigree collapse of 90%."
In addition, the average person would not have access as a mate to more than a small fraction of that 430 million. Going back further, to 1000, the total population of Europe is estimated at 56.4 million. Someone in rural England will be much more likely to marry someone in his own village, possibly a cousin of some degree, than someone from France or Italy.
I understand that pedigree collapse is inevitable.
But I really don't understand why people says things like "that couldn't be, or you would be a descendant of half of the population of Europe alive at that time".
Well, I don't see any reason why a person today can not be a descendant of ALMOST EVERYONE alive in Europe in the year 1000.
On a long enough timeline, the descendants of everyone alive today (and who have descedants) will eventually mix up.
So, I don't see why people think that it "couldn't be" that some people today are descendants of 70% or 80% of all Europeans alive in the year 1000 (or maybe in the year 500, or the year 200)
Someone in rural England will be much more likely to marry someone in his own village, possibly a cousin of some degree, than someone from France or Italy.
I know.
But it's a sure thing that HUNDREDS of people born in rural England eventually got married to someone from France or Italy.
Just imagine a man born in Gloucestershire who went to the Crusades, and eventually married to a woman from Naples, when he was coming back from the Crusade, and stayed in South Italy for some time...
Then he brought his wife back to England, and they had 6 children, and 15 grandchildren...
I understand that pedigree collapse is inevitable.
But I really don't understand why people says things like "that couldn't be, or you would be a descendant of half of the population of Europe alive at that time".
Well, I don't see any reason why a person today can not be a descendant of ALMOST EVERYONE alive in Europe in the year 1000.
On a long enough timeline, the descendants of everyone alive today (and who have descedants) will eventually mix up.
So, I don't see why people think that it "couldn't be" that some people today are descendants of 70% or 80% of all Europeans alive in the year 1000 (or maybe in the year 500, or the year 200)
Quote:
Originally Posted by MalaMan
I know.
But it's a sure thing that HUNDREDS of people born in rural England eventually got married to someone from France or Italy.
Just imagine a man born in Gloucestershire who went to the Crusades, and eventually married to a woman from Naples, when he was coming back from the Crusade, and stayed in South Italy for some time...
Then he brought his wife back to England, and they had 6 children, and 15 grandchildren...
This article tells us we are all related within a fairly recent time frame.
Your original post asked how many ancestors we have who were alive in the year 1000. Pedigree collapse is crucial in determining that number. The above article cannot tell us that, because the number of slots in the pedigree exceeds the number of individuals available to fill them. For any individual the number of ancestors will depend on how many times one individual fills different slots. Chadgates in his post above has only 300 people filling 660 slots. That will drastically reduce the number of ancestors he had living in 1000.
Your original post asked how many ancestors we have who were alive in the year 1000. Pedigree collapse is crucial in determining that number. The above article cannot tell us that, because the number of slots in the pedigree exceeds the number of individuals available to fill them. For any individual the number of ancestors will depend on how many times one individual fills different slots. Chadgates in his post above has only 300 people filling 660 slots. That will drastically reduce the number of ancestors he had living in 1000.
It is even worse than I thought.
Since Malaman was quite vocal in his insistence that we were over estimating pedigree collapse it got me to thinking, "maybe I DID over estimate".
I admit that when I posted that I didn't have an actual count of unique individuals, but "estimated" due to the frequency of some people in my pedigree.
So last night I spent a few hours actually listing every person and then counting them. Here are the numbers which are even more staggering than I first implied.
Since my first occurrence of pedigree collapse doesn't happen until my 6th great grandparent's generation (although it happens quite a bit) I will begin there.
1st number is amount of "slots".
2nd number is how many of those slots I have filled in.
3rd number is how many of the second number are unique individuals.
Gen 8 - 256/172/153
Gen 9 - 512/267/219
Gen 10 - 1024/426/300
Gen 11 - 2048/558/270
Gen 12 - 4096/669/181
Gen 13 - 8192/454/115
Gen 14 - 16384/185/51
Gen 15 - 32768/52/20
The 20 people making up the 52 slots in generation 15 were all born mid to late 1500s.
So looking at those numbers and then realizing that while it was atypical for the 1600-1700s (because these particular people were very endogamous), it certainly is likely to be fairly representative of people in 1000 AD, due to inability of the average person to travel and the sheer lack of unrelated people available to marry in the average village.
Last edited by chadgates; 12-31-2015 at 06:26 AM..
If you go back 3000 years, in theory you would have 1,267,650,600,228,229,401,496,703,205,376 ancestors."
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