The Past: Your Ancestor Cone
So let’s start with the past, and see what happens if we keep going up the family tree, or what I’ll call your Ancestor Cone:
You can see that things get hectic pretty quickly when you start moving back generations. The top row is the 128-person group of your great5 grandparents, or your grandparents’ grandparents’ great-grandparents. The thing that I find surprising is how recently in time you had such a large number of ancestors. Estimating an average generation at 25-30 years, most of those people were your current age around 1800-1825. So the early 19th-century world contained 128 random strangers going about their lives, each of whose genes makes up 1/128th of who you are today.
Who were they all? What countries did they live in? What did they all do with their lives? What tragedies did they endure and what were their greatest triumphs? What were the 254 parent-child relationships in this diagram like? Which of the 252 in-law relationships above were close and loving and which were angry and contentious?
The craziest thing to me is that this diagram, which only represents the last 200 years of your ancestry, contains 127 romantic relationships, each involving at least one critical sex moment and most of them probably involving deep love. You’re the product of 127 romances, just in the last 200 years alone.
Alright, I’m nervous about this, but I’m gonna take a crack at going back even further—
Okay that got completely out of hand. This diagram only goes five generations farther back than the one above it and look at the insanity that took place.
The 4,096 human beings in the top section are your great10 grandparents. Most of them were your age in the second half of the 1600s, just as the Enlightenment was getting going in Europe.
You can see why it’s not really that impressive when someone tells you they are descended from famous royalty who lived a few hundred years ago. Look how many people you’re descended from only about 300 years back! Within that top section, there’s probably some royalty, in addition to some peasants, scholars, warriors, painters, prostitutes, murderers, lunatics, and any other kind of person who existed back then.
Finally, I know I already made this point in the evolution post, but look closely at that top section and notice that you can actually see 4,096 distinct tiny people in there—and realize that if you pluck just one of them from there, you would not exist today. Come on.