this post was submitted on 22 Nov 2023
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i wonder what percentage of people understand that all living things on earth share a common ancestor.
Not enough.
I was fortunate enough to sit through an impromptu family tree debate after I had been made aware that to some degree we are all related.
I lack the words to adequately describe the reactions of shock and horror when people who had been married for decades suddenly realized they shared real and somewhat close blood relation, some times only two or three generations apart.
People in small towns especially, go back only a couple generations and they all start merging. Then they act shocked our town of <5000 people is all related
80,000 people in my town and the risk is still pretty serious
This might be a really dumb question, but is it possible that any two human beings don't share a common ancestor? Like, do we all link back to a single bacteria or were there multiple "made" at once?
There is a genetic Adam and Eve. However, I don't think they existed at the same time. These were humans, not just apes/mammals/animals/bacteria. We are all distantly related.
We are also more related to mushrooms than trees are to mushrooms.
Yeah, it's hard to pin down when these common ancestors lived precisely, especially given that as portions of our genome go extinct, the common ancestor will change.
But Y-chromosomal Adam is estimated to have lived around 200,000 years ago, while estimates for when Mitochondrial Eve lived are a bit more recent, around 150,000 years ago.
how far back is that in terms of great grandpas and great grandmas?
According to an unverified internet search, the average age of childbirth for women throughout history is 23.2 years, and for men it is 30.7.
So, statistically, your great^6463 grandmother is the same as mine. Same goes for our great^6512 grandfather.
wow! that’s quite a few. i wonder what our great^6512^ grandparents were like
They were freaks. They didn't have as many generations of separation so they were definitely fucking their cousin at best.
A quarter of us trace back to one mongol, fairly certain there’s going to be a point we all tie together to the same ape eating magic mushrooms in what would become Africa. Long ass time ago though
No, all humans share a common ancestor, as does all multicellular life. Google clades for more info.
With how funky micro organisms are with sharing DNA I'm not sure it matters. I've heard it likened to the genetic tree turning into a bush instead whare it's a big mes of sharing of DNA across species.
That doesn't mean fucking someone that close to you doesn't come with risks.
But as long as it's not multigenerational it's a very small increase to the already small percentage of defects.
If it required charts to explain and took years to work out then I'm guessing it probably wasn't first cousin's, and may not have even been second cousins. By the time you are at that level the risk is probably barely different than picking someone from the same country as you at random.
Could be a case of a long lost uncle
And...? What are you saying?
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