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Archiver > GENEALOGY-DNA > 2001-09 > 0999887220


From: "Bonner, Gregg" <>
Subject: RE: [DNA] MtDNA Results
Date: Fri, 7 Sep 2001 14:27:00 -0400


I would be willing to bet that he was not unaware of that. Maybe it would be
helpful to state it in reverse - under the same caveat viz. descendancy, as
well as ancestry, is a geometric progression. So to say you are descended
from Ursula is a little like (a person of European extraction) saying they
are descended from Charlemagne. Who isn't? The only distinction is that it
follows the maternal line the whole way. I still think it is amusing to know
about that ONE line, and, as you suggest, what turns out to probably be more
than one line. However many lines there are that are likely to lead to
Ursula, they are ALL still unknown except that one. So in the end, the
technique still only informs you of N out of 2^N, or whatever number the
population as a whole will bear. And that is a proportion that gets very
small very fast.

If only everyone would have ensured that they had a son and a daughter who
each had a son and daughter themselves, then we could have reconstructed the
whole of the human population tree.

Cheers,

Gregg


-----Original Message-----
From:
To:
Sent: 9/7/01 3:59 AM
Subject: Re: [DNA] MtDNA Results

In a message dated 01-09-07 02:50:41 EDT, writes:

<< Just going back to the time of Christ one might have about 10^30
grandparents give or take a million or so. >>

It seems to me that one problem with using the raw numbers from the
calculator is that it assumes that none of these people are related to
each
other (they're just related to you). But this wouldn't be true going
that far
back. In other words, some of your ancestors would have common
ancestors. So
the actual number would be something less than what the calculator says
for a
given generation.

So, if you were to go back 2000 years and consider that to be 80
generations
(let's assume 25 years per generation just for this argument) you
couldn't
just take 2*80 (this is meant to be 2 to the 80th power) and say this
would
be your number of ancestors for that generation. It would be something
less
than that. How much less? I have no idea. I'm not a scientist (just an
old
retired computer programmer). But one can easily see how just using the
raw
calculator numbers you can rather easily acquire more "ancestors" than
there
are people available to be "ancestors" at a given point in time.

Regards,
Bill


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