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Migrate the ancestors post
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Kayce Basques committed Jan 23, 2024
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44 changes: 8 additions & 36 deletions src/blog/ancestors.md
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---
layout: base.njk
title: "You have thousands of ancestors from the 1500s"
---

# {{ title }}
<noscript>
It looks like you have JavaScript disabled. This page uses JavaScript to
redirect you to https://www.biodigitaljazz.net/blog/ancestors.html so I guess
you can just manually redirect yourself instead?
</noscript>

I usually think about lineages from the perspective of the ancestor. E.g. my
grandpa had 5 kids; those 5 kids produced 9 grandkids; those 9 grandkids
produced 3 great-grandkids (so far); 17 descendants in total.

Over the last few days, I've been having fun thinking about the situation in
reverse, from the perspective of the descendant. Here's a quote from *Genes:
A Very Short Introduction* by Jonathan Slack:

> Also, when considering 'roots', some of the basic mathematics of inheritance
> needs to be borne in mind. With fully random matings the number of your
> ancestors doubles every generation. Ten generations ago (250-300 years) we
> might expect about 1,000 ancestors each contributing 0.1 percent of their
> total variants to your genome... when the number of ancestors exceeds
> 2,000-3,000 (12 generations would be about 4,000), it is likely that some
> ancestral sections of DNA have been lost altogether... by about 15
> generations back many of the ancestors contribute no DNA variants at all but
> they are still ancestors on the lineage. So, even though we all have an
> ancestry running back to the origin of life on Earth, we do not necessarily
> have any DNA variants from most of our ancestors.
[original version of this post]: https://web.archive.org/web/20230905030056/https://kayce.basqu.es/blog/ancestors/
[Hacker News discussion]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37387341

(In the [original version of this post] I did a thought experiment here to calculate
when the number of ancestors starts to get nonsensical, i.e. if you double the
number of ancestors every generation there's a point where the number of ancestors
exceeds the total number of humans at that point. I've removed this thought experiment
because I think it distracts from my main idea. See the [Hacker News discussion].)

[pedigree collapse]: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pedigree_collapse

Your exact number of ancestors depends on how much [pedigree collapse] there
is in your lineage, but I'm pretty sure the basic premise of this blog post
holds: you've got a lot of ancestors.
<script>
window.location.replace('https://www.biodigitaljazz.net/blog/ancestors.html');
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1 change: 0 additions & 1 deletion src/index.md
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Expand Up @@ -27,6 +27,5 @@ I'm currently docs lead for [Pigweed](https://pigweed.dev).
## Blog

* [Proper Full Moon songs](/blog/moon/)
* [You have thousands of ancestors from the 1500s](/blog/ancestors/)
* [Why I'm taking a sabbatical](/blog/sabbatical/)
* [My favorite words](/blog/words/)

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