The unsettling thing about everyone’s family tree is there a lot more incest than anyone would be comfortable with in it. The various royal families of the world just wrote it down.
I kept one dude and like 5 women in the family room to populate the entire vault, then I would kick out people that didn’t have the same last name and then eventually kicked out all the males so it was just a 200 dweller vault of sisters
yeah, it’s about 28 generations ago, if we assume a generation to be about 25 years, where the number of ancestors you would need to have for a family tree without overlaps becomes more than the number of people alive on earth at the time. 228 is roughly the number of people alive on earth in the year 1326, which is 28×25 years ago. that’s the theoretical limit of how far back you can go without someone fucking their cousin of some degree, and it requires an exceptionally well-traveled family
All my ancestors up to 6 generations back were born in the same 200 kilometer radius circle. Most of them did not die in the town where they were born.
People move. They are displaced by war and natural disaster, they go on pilgrimages, they go to the city to get rare goods, they migrate to places with more prosperity and more jobs, they learn trade skills from schools or from experts, they find causes they believe in or causes that pay well, they go to festivals and plays and celebrity performances, and they marry.
This was true in the 19th century, but also in the 15th and the 6th and the 40th BCE. Migration is normal. People live rich and complicated lives. For a peasant, one of the sons might inherit the farm, but his wife is from out of town and the other siblings find other things to do that take them elsewhere. Serfs may be bound to the land, but a lord will usually offer dispensation if it is in his interest, and arrange for festivals to keep his stock fresh. And slaves were traded often to prevent them from forming attachments. And burghers, clergy, and nobility naturally tended to travel far.
Yeah. From what I recall from uni classes on this ten years ago (so we might well know more now) that couldn’t be totally ruled out for the very earliest forms of life but we are as certain as we could be about bacteria just being one tree, and likewise for archaea&eukaryotes.
But seriously, how much “incest” does the average family tree really have? And I’m drawing the line at great-grandparents, anything less than that is unrelated imo.
Royals were doing multiple generations of first-degree incest, that’s on a completely different level from normal people.
There’s probably lots of first and second cousins who married in centuries past, though even most royals usually didn’t do as much inbreeding as the extreme examples like the ancient Egyptians and Habsburgs. It became pretty common to look for spouses all over the continent, that’s why so many of the european royal families are related in various ways; arguably that means that they were probably less inbred than the average villager in most cases.
Like I said, royals aren’t normal people. See the fabled family tree of the Ptolemaic dynasty:
But that only works if you have a family fortune to protect. Normal people would rather spread their children around and increase their chances of survival.
So for example: Cleopatra II was first married to Ptolemy VI, her brother, and had a daughter Cleopatra III. Then when Ptolemy VI died Cleopatra II was married to Ptolemy VIII, her other brother. Ptolemy VIII also took his niece Cleopatra III as his second wife.
Honestly, a family history of inbreeding doesn’t mean much for the individual so long as it’s not directly involved in their own birth. The issue with inbreeding is that every family has a few rare recessive conditions that simply don’t manifest because they’re rare enough to never be shared with the other families that they’re having kids with, but if 2 people from the same family have a kid, that kid is way more likely to end up with 2 broken copies of the gene and have the familial condition.
However, even if your own parent has both broken copies, they can only pass 1 to you, and if your other parent is from another family, they likely won’t have the same condition, so they’ll pass you a working copy guaranteed and you’re good. It’s certainly not ideal, because it does concentrate the broken genes over time in a family if inbreeding continues, but a family history of inbreeding isn’t really much of a red flag health-wise if your own parents aren’t related.
In pre-colonial Australia, population numbers were so low, a lot of groups had to invent marriage laws to preserve genetic diversity. There are various “skin grouping systems” (it’s nothing to do with the colour of your skin) that say who you can marry, and the systems are designed to minimise cousin fucking and make you go travel to find a spouse so your clan will have plenty of fresh new genes and take good care of the old ones.
First Australians had a better understanding of genetics than European royals thousands of years ago.
When I looked in to it on one of my parents’ sides, it’s like 15 generations/450 years of almost no mobility on a ±30km² area of 4 small villages around the same river… Only 2 generations ago did some break away from the area, mainly to larger cities nearby and for all the hundreds of others in the tree I researched I found only 1 older move to a big city about 150y ago. I’m assuming the no-mobility tree (tho sources end in middle ages) continues like that to Roman times and even further back. Before trains and cars, many people didn’t leave their birth area at all during their entire life.
The unsettling thing about everyone’s family tree is there a lot more incest than anyone would be comfortable with in it. The various royal families of the world just wrote it down.
It’s not incest when you get to the point where overlapping lines are mathematically impossible
Reminds me of when I played Fallout Shelter, I made a spreadsheet to keep track of all my vault dwellers’ families.
With the population of a tiny town, it did not take very long at all for the whole vault to become one clan.
I kept one dude and like 5 women in the family room to populate the entire vault, then I would kick out people that didn’t have the same last name and then eventually kicked out all the males so it was just a 200 dweller vault of sisters
That sounds like a proper vault.
yeah, it’s about 28 generations ago, if we assume a generation to be about 25 years, where the number of ancestors you would need to have for a family tree without overlaps becomes more than the number of people alive on earth at the time. 228 is roughly the number of people alive on earth in the year 1326, which is 28×25 years ago. that’s the theoretical limit of how far back you can go without someone fucking their cousin of some degree, and it requires an exceptionally well-traveled family
In reality, usually it’s staying inside of a small village of maybe a few hundred. Easily within 10 generations, the entire village is related.
All my ancestors up to 6 generations back were born in the same 200 kilometer radius circle. Most of them did not die in the town where they were born.
People move. They are displaced by war and natural disaster, they go on pilgrimages, they go to the city to get rare goods, they migrate to places with more prosperity and more jobs, they learn trade skills from schools or from experts, they find causes they believe in or causes that pay well, they go to festivals and plays and celebrity performances, and they marry.
This was true in the 19th century, but also in the 15th and the 6th and the 40th BCE. Migration is normal. People live rich and complicated lives. For a peasant, one of the sons might inherit the farm, but his wife is from out of town and the other siblings find other things to do that take them elsewhere. Serfs may be bound to the land, but a lord will usually offer dispensation if it is in his interest, and arrange for festivals to keep his stock fresh. And slaves were traded often to prevent them from forming attachments. And burghers, clergy, and nobility naturally tended to travel far.
At some point back, you are related to every human who was on earth.
At some point back you are (probably) related to every living thing on earth, and at the very least every animal and plant and fungus.
The only exception would be if life had evolved more than once on earth, which is totally possible but we would probably be able to tell.
Yeah. From what I recall from uni classes on this ten years ago (so we might well know more now) that couldn’t be totally ruled out for the very earliest forms of life but we are as certain as we could be about bacteria just being one tree, and likewise for archaea&eukaryotes.
Yeah, I can see that.
But seriously, how much “incest” does the average family tree really have? And I’m drawing the line at great-grandparents, anything less than that is unrelated imo.
Royals were doing multiple generations of first-degree incest, that’s on a completely different level from normal people.
There’s probably lots of first and second cousins who married in centuries past, though even most royals usually didn’t do as much inbreeding as the extreme examples like the ancient Egyptians and Habsburgs. It became pretty common to look for spouses all over the continent, that’s why so many of the european royal families are related in various ways; arguably that means that they were probably less inbred than the average villager in most cases.
Well the guy who got cut off in the screenshot has quite a bit
Like I said, royals aren’t normal people. See the fabled family tree of the Ptolemaic dynasty:
But that only works if you have a family fortune to protect. Normal people would rather spread their children around and increase their chances of survival.
Yikes! You have to go back at least 4 generations from Cleopatra VII to find ANYONE that isn’t EXCLUSIVELY a descendant of Arsinoe III and Ptolemy IV.
Holy shit!
So for example: Cleopatra II was first married to Ptolemy VI, her brother, and had a daughter Cleopatra III. Then when Ptolemy VI died Cleopatra II was married to Ptolemy VIII, her other brother. Ptolemy VIII also took his niece Cleopatra III as his second wife.
Honestly, a family history of inbreeding doesn’t mean much for the individual so long as it’s not directly involved in their own birth. The issue with inbreeding is that every family has a few rare recessive conditions that simply don’t manifest because they’re rare enough to never be shared with the other families that they’re having kids with, but if 2 people from the same family have a kid, that kid is way more likely to end up with 2 broken copies of the gene and have the familial condition.
However, even if your own parent has both broken copies, they can only pass 1 to you, and if your other parent is from another family, they likely won’t have the same condition, so they’ll pass you a working copy guaranteed and you’re good. It’s certainly not ideal, because it does concentrate the broken genes over time in a family if inbreeding continues, but a family history of inbreeding isn’t really much of a red flag health-wise if your own parents aren’t related.
In pre-colonial Australia, population numbers were so low, a lot of groups had to invent marriage laws to preserve genetic diversity. There are various “skin grouping systems” (it’s nothing to do with the colour of your skin) that say who you can marry, and the systems are designed to minimise cousin fucking and make you go travel to find a spouse so your clan will have plenty of fresh new genes and take good care of the old ones.
First Australians had a better understanding of genetics than European royals thousands of years ago.
When I looked in to it on one of my parents’ sides, it’s like 15 generations/450 years of almost no mobility on a ±30km² area of 4 small villages around the same river… Only 2 generations ago did some break away from the area, mainly to larger cities nearby and for all the hundreds of others in the tree I researched I found only 1 older move to a big city about 150y ago. I’m assuming the no-mobility tree (tho sources end in middle ages) continues like that to Roman times and even further back. Before trains and cars, many people didn’t leave their birth area at all during their entire life.