3000 Years Later, It’s Still a Small World
How far back do you have to go to connect your branches to the rest of the world’s? Says science writer Steve Olson, only about 3,000 years.
Olson, author of Mapping Human History, began his quest to find the most recent common ancestor after hearing about Mitochondrial Eve—a female believed to have lived 150,000 years ago, who can be found in every family tree. But when Olson did the math, it seemed there was greater potential for the numbers. “I realized there had to be ancestors more common than [Mitochondrial Eve],” Olson says.
To prove his theory, Olson recruited Yale statistician Joseph Chang and MIT neuroscientist Douglas Rohde. Together, the group went beyond mere generations and included mating, geography, migration, culture, language, and social class in their equation.
The resulting formula, says Olson, works like this: “In 1,500 years or so, I’ll be the ancestor of most of the people living on the planet. And then, several thousand years from now, I’ll be the ancestor of everyone living on the planet. [This research] ties people together and makes them realize they are more closely related than they thought they were.”
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