A Family Tree of all mankind - part 7

Gaussian Distribution.
      Let us return to the question: "How many generations of descent are there between myself and Charlemagne, born in 741 AD? Well I jump into the tree and start counting, picking some arbitrary line of descent and I count 40. But if I do it again taking a different path, I just counted 46. I am able to determine that the maximum number of generations out of all the lines entered into my tree between Charlemagne and myself is 49. I am unable to determine the minimum with certainty, but after a good investigation I've counted a 36, but I'm going to make 35 the minimum. MOST counts come up about 42, with few coming up at either extreme. This is a Gaussian distribution! It may be skewed one way or the other, but it's too hard for me to investigate this formally. Let us hypothesize that it's symmetrical around the mean, and we can now answer the original question in a definite way. How many generations back to Charlemagne? The answer is:

      He is ALL of the above, all at the same time. He is our 33rd Great Grandfather, and he is also our 47th Great Grandfather, and everywhere in between. We should say he is our 40th Great Grandfather (42-2), since that's where he occurs the most in the pedigree. But to be completely correct and mathematically rigorous, his ancestral distance from us is a Gaussian with some mu (mean) and sigma (standard deviation). If you are not familiar with the normal distribution you should read up on it because it's extremely common everywhere.

      What about your immediate grandparents - how far are they away from you? 2 generations of course. But even that comes with a Gaussian distribution; it's just that the standard deviation of such a near ancestor is zero, because all 4 data points lie on the mean! To generalize, all ancestors, even as near as your parents, can be described as being a Gaussian distribution away from you, characterized by the 2 parameters mu and sigma. The further you go back, the greater mu and sigma both become, and the more closely the curve approximates the normal. The nearer in time an ancestor is to you, the more "lumpy" the curve will look, as it can't look very normal yet with poor resolution. I'm going to call this phenomenon in genealogy Pedigree Collapse Distribution (PCD), although I haven't ever seen that term before. Note: The true distribution is not likely to be a true gaussian, but I think that's the best way to imagine it.
      I'm not sure how the aristocracy bias inherent in my tree effects the PCD shape, but I would think it has the effect of skew. We know there is a demographic difference between the rich and the poor, and we also know the average longevity of humans (aka life expectancy) has been increasing with time. The following chart I have found online:

  

    

      So I make the assumption that the rich had a longer average life expectancy than the poor, which I think is very reasonable. I maintain that my postulated "average age between generations" of 28.5 years in my tree may still be plausible in spite of the fact that the above chart line shows the average age of everybody is less. Without the aristocracy bias, clearly it would not be possible for the average span between generations to be 28.5, when the average life expectancy of the population is 25.

      One more thing about Pedigree Collapse. There was a famous legendary debate in 1860 between Samuel Wilberforce, bishop of Oxford and T. H. Huxley who championed Darwin's evolution.
      "...the Bishop rose, and in a light scoffing tone assured us there was nothing in the idea of evolution. Then, turning to his antagonist (Huxley) with a smiling insolence, he begged to know, was it through his grandfather or his grandmother that he claimed his descent from a monkey?..."
Sounds like the bishop thought he was quite clever. Hopefully the answer is apparent enough - both.

Continued on page 8.

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A Family Tree of all Mankind - part 6

Charts and Graphs.
      So back to my project. What the heck does the family tree for all of humanity even look like? We can answer this taking it in small pieces. Let's start with a chart of human population over time:

    

      Human population is trying to grow exponentially while also being constrained by a ceiling of finite resources. Let's flip that on it's side by rotating clockwise to imagine what a descending tree from a single ancestor (like Adam) looks like:

      But my ascending tree is building up in the other direction starting from my trunk in the present. My ascending tree resides within the larger descending boundary of world population. They are both growing exponentially in opposite directions toward each other, until they meet:

   

      And you get something like a diamond shape on the inside. That's what my ancestor tree should look like in theory. It expands outward until it hits the limits of world population at which point it can't grow anymore because that's impossible! This is all dramatically over-simplified of course because the whole world isn't one giant pool of population. There were geographically isolated groups of people whose separate gene pools were like different little petri dishes all cultivating their own stuff, with little bits occasionally being transferred across and between like strands. Occasionally we had major migrations and invasions, and mainly royal families intermarrying across larger geographic distances. Globally, we had major petri dishes like the Americas, Indonesia, China, and Africa etc. Then within those we had smaller, more locally integrated petri dishes like France, Spain, Britain, Germany, and Scandinavia etc. So I envision my local ancestor tree within the global descendant tree as this sort of football-shaped overlapping lattice structure that I'm going to try to draw in paint, but it really doesn't do the image in my mind much justice:

 

   

      Lol. Do I get an A for effort for this masterpiece of art? C+ maybe? Most other articles I've read refer to this phenomenon as a "diamond" shape, or a 4-pointed-star rather than a football I think. And they may have a point (ha ha pun), but I do prefer to think of it as a football because a football is more 3D. This is only a very rough 2D depiction of a higher dimensional landscape of our ancestors. I think it would be very excellent if someone created an interactive 3D model or space to display the whole world's family tree (ascending and descending both) in which time is along the z axis and geographical location is along the x and y. So imagine that you had a Cartesian map of the Earth on the floor making up the x and y dimensions. The present day (time = z = 0) is the floor level, and going up in the +z direction goes back in time. Within a computer model, such a simulation could handle all ancestors and cousins as points that could be connected by lines of relationship. Following the lines, either up or down, one would see the tree branching out, and fusing back together. This would be really cool to zoom in and out of, and click on individuals to bring up info, and trace certain pathways, and get a more visual understanding of what deeper trees really look like instead of just many separate slices of it, 2D at a time. I don't have the time or ability to create this, but if someone else reading this does have the programming skills, I think would be really educational and insightful to build a platform for this network. It would be an interesting alternative to the way genealogy is being displayed now on the internet with hyperlinked webpages for the nodes. These provide an "inside-view" of the footballs but never the whole bigger-picture at any given time.
      Everyone now living or who has ever lived and is known could conceivably be plotted/imported in, as well as primates, mammals, dinosaurs and the whole gamut of the rest of life's evolution too. And I'm certain that by getting a better visualization of certain aspects of a network of individuals in a population like this, some insights can be gleaned that are applicable to understanding the relationships and interfaces between different species, in particular - primates.
      For example, we know that during evolution mutations occur, and some of those are favorable and eventually come to dominate in the population, while the competing traits/genes that were inferior go extinct. It's tempting to simply understand this by imagining all the later population being descended from the one individual who made the original mutation, but not descended from the rest of the population that didn't mutate. But this is not correct. Remember I showed on an earlier page how everyone is descended from ~80% of a whole population, and no one is descended from the remaining ~20% whose progeny went extinct. (80 and 20 are just variables of course, that would differ between species and situations) The evolution of the genes in the pool is separate and subtly different from the evolution of the individuals, which are massive conglomerations of the genes. The interface between different species are therefore not singular "points" of connection (or a single pair of 1 male + 1 female), but are regions of width and length in the xy plane of my imagined model. Like when humans passed through the Toba Catastrophe genetic bottleneck 70k years ago, this is what that would look like:

      You could imagine tracing only your mother's mother's mother's line etc... until you can get no further. Then you could extend that by what you know about your mitochondrial DNA, which only females pass on. I read a wonderful book by Bryan Sykes called The Seven Daughers of Eve that lays out a depiction of what genetic analysis has to say about humanity's matrilinear ancestries. A case is made that depending on which humans on Earth you sample, there are seven major genetic Eves from which humans might descend. Those 7 Eves lived at very different times and places, and are themselves further descended from all humanity's singular most-recent Mitochondrial-Eve (M-Eve's mother would also be an M-Eve, but at some point there must be a most recent one). On the other hand you can trace your father's father's father's line etc... and extrapolate that together with your Y-Chromosomal DNA to do the same thing patrilinially to your Y-chromosomal Adam. These 2 extremes within your tree form a special boundary or outline of what your personal ancestor tree looks like, but there is also everywhere else in-between the outlines. If you go up one generation (to your parents) and do the same for them, and plot out their matrilineal and patrilineal lines, they will follow different pathways back through the intermediate Adams/Eves on their way back to the first universal ones. This hypothetical ancestor is called LUCA for Last Universal Common Ancestor. It's important but subtle to also understand that the LUCA-Adam did not necessarily need to live contemporaneously with the LUCA-Eve.
      I've read that scientists now believe Neanderthals and our Cro-Magnon ancestors that displaced them did interbreed to an extent, and some small percentage of our DNA today comes from them. I also recall reading somewhere the hypothesis that they couldn't interbreed because of different chromosome numbers, which would cause their offspring to be sterile (like how the Mule is a cross between horse and donkey), but I suppose that hypothesis was falsified. Anyway, the point is that if this is true we are all descended from the whole population of Neanderthals (or ~80% thereof), not just a few specific ones. And if it was possible for other species of the ancient primates to interbreed, then scientists' quest to find the missing link of our human evolutionary pathway through the primates may not be asking the exact right question. There may in fact be multiple correct pathways.

      Back to my tree project - the next chart shows a sideways view of the football structure from my above artistic-masterpiece. I'm able to take some actual data from my tree and show how it compares to the "diamond point" or star or football theory. This next chart shows the "width" of my tree project's data. Keep in mind, in practice the width is determined by how many ancestors at a given generational slice are known and therefore entered into the software, and in theory the width would be much greater if we had complete information. But we'll take what we can get, and hope that in practice and in theory correlate to some degree. Which I think they do.

      On the X axis is the number of generations going back from the present time. On the Y axis I have number of people (For example, if you went back 3 generations your width at that point would be 8 people, assuming no pedigree collapse.) This chart is at its widest 28 generations ago. Using 28.5 years per generation, that is 800 years ago at around 1200 AD. What's significant about this chart are the two curves 1.) along the uphill slope on the left, and 2.) along the downhill slope on the right. The curve on the left is an exponential - It's growing at a rate of 2^n, or at least it would be if all the ancestor slots were filled in. But of course they aren't, as I explained earlier, so the growth is slower than 2^n. The downhill curve on the right shows exactly what you would expect to see in a deep-time family tree, and that is the pedigree collapse, which again, is where the same sets of ancestors start appearing in multiple places in the pedigree. In my tree at around 800 years ago, the rate of pedigree collapse starts to overtake the rate of exponentiation to new unique ancestors.

      Let's examine the timing of the peak at 800 years ago. Imagine that inbreeding doesn't happen, and that all our ancestors were unique. That comes out to 2^28 = 268 million people. What was the population of the World at that time? Well it was something like 350 million. But let's forget about the world as a whole and let's just talk about Europe, because 99% of all the people listed in my tree from 1200 are in Europe. Actually my tree at this point probably gives a pretty fair representation across Europe as a whole, including France, Spain, Germany, Britain etc. The population of Europe in 1200 AD was close to 100 million. Clearly 268 million unique ancestors at this time is impossible, not to mention that my listed names are mainly the rich and aristocratic who made up only a minority of the actual population. Objectively, most of our ancestors were the peasants and the poor. So clearly, pedigree collapse has been happening to a great extent well BEFORE the peak at 28 generations, but to repeat what I said earlier, it is the RATE of pedigree collapse that overtakes the RATE of exponentiation that this peak at 800 years ago represents. Another interesting observation: There is an unusual, significant spike right before the main spike that occurs at about 26 generations back. It seems to me that the obvious explanation for this anomaly is the bubonic plague. After all, it is occurring at just the right time when the plague decimated Europe. (The word decimated actually doesn't do the plague justice, since the etymology of that word comes from when the Roman legions' commanders would kill 1 out of every 10 soldiers - hence the prefix "deci". So if decimation kills only 1 in 10, it doesn't quite do the plague justice. But I digress.) I suppose the plague killed off the wealthy less-so than the poor, but regardless of the actual casualty rates between the rich and poor, and given our chart's bias toward the rich, the concern people had with record keeping would have also probably declined at this time. Who is going to concern themselves about genealogy and record keeping when everyone's dying? When 30% to as high as 70% of a population gets wiped out, you might expect genealogical data we have 700 years later to be attenuated, and that does seem to be the case.

      Another observation: The chart also shows a local peak at around generation 15. Let's do the math (15 * 28.5 = 430) which puts us back at 1575 AD. The immigration of people to the Americas is a notoriously difficult bridge for genealogists to gap. Most family lines dead end without a trace around this time, so we are not surprised to see this peak here either, being immediately followed by an attenuation in the chart. It's pretty common to be able to trace back a few generations from the individuals that actually did the immigration, but still 1575 AD seems a little on the early side to be seeing a peak for the American immigration. It turns out, the small peak at generation 15 comes mostly from the French Canadians which seem to have keep excellent family tree records back until about 1600 AD. What about that small but discernible bulge of expansion out at 70 generations ago? That is the Roman empire. 70 generations would put us right back at around the year 0. As before, that bulge is indeed correlated to increased record keeping, and availability of genealogical data. The Roman Empire has been described as a beacon of light in the otherwise barbaric past, and so it's no coincidence that the bulge occurs right where you might expect to see more data and person entries in the tree.

      I said earlier that my Family Tree Maker 2005 software only allows me to handle a maximum 99 generations at a time, so that's why the chart ends at 99. Because of the nature of how I produced this chart using FTM 2005, and because the way it handles duplicate ancestors (pedigree collapse), this chart is only a good approximation to the way things actually occur in the tree. And of course my family tree itself is only an approximation to the way our ancestors actually were in reality. So I'm just pointing out that this approximation of an approximation to reality is less than perfect, and there's an inherent margin of error. Furthermore the software wasn't at all designed for this level of insanity. It's more of a consumer product for retirees that want to upload photos and produce pretty charts within say the last 200 years.

For good measure, here's the same chart as above but shown cumulatively:

      Note that this chart approaches the number 24,523 asymptotically because that's the total number of ancestors in the tree. If I could plot the x axis all the way out to the end, the last data point would occur at (186,Y-2):

The fabled Adam and Eve.

Continued on page 7.

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A Family Tree of all Mankind - part 5

Everyone is related.
      Ok so this is all mind blowing and hard to swallow right? Descent from Adam and Eve psshht ya right! Well I should talk about how I even made this tree in the first place and where did the data come from? The answer of course is the internet. All my data ultimately came from other people who uploaded the info onto the internet. Except the more recent data closer to the trunk of my personal tree that is relevant to myself. Believe it or not, it's actually easier to find genealogical data the further you go back, because the further back an ancestor lived, the more descendants he has now living. It is said that there is a genealogist in every family, so the more genealogists there are researching an ancestor, the more is known about that ancestor. This only applies back to about 500 years ago or so, and after that you just take whatever you can get - whatever history remembers. And the question must be asked: "How true and valid is this tree as a whole, in its entirety?" Can we really swallow the hypothesis that Adam and Eve were our 186th great grandparents and every discrete step along the whole line of descent could actually be valid and continuous? Answer: The tree is only as true or valid as the sources that provided the info. In recent times those sources could be birth records, death records, wills or probate records. Further back, say 300 years ago you might get letters of correspondence or ships' logs of passengers or legal records of land holdings. Further back, say 500 years ago in England you might have only scant Church parish records - the lucky ones to not have been consumed by fire yet. Beyond that in the middle ages, there is surprisingly a lot of information for the genealogies of land owners. For within the houses of the barons and aristocracy, there could be many diverse sources of info that correspond like puzzle pieces coming together to recreate the family tree picture. As you continue to go back further, the validity and fidelity of the information decreases sharply as you deviate from royalty. Once you get back to around the Norman invasion of England and the Battle of Hastings in 1066 AD, information drops off very sharply for everyone. It's similar to the way family trees tend to vanish as you try to cross the barrier of the American immigration. The Normans who were ultimately of Viking ancestry invaded and displaced the Saxon royal houses, and in Saxon England before William the Conqueror, people didn't have last names. Last names emerged after this time by law and decree for the purposes of tax collection. So for pre-1000 AD in England and Europe ancestry is constrained mainly to the extreme upper levels of the elite. At this point, pretty much any document of written history is fair game. The Bible gives all kinds of genealogies from Adam to David to Jesus and everywhere in between, so I used that data. Archaeology and the hieroglyphs of ancient Egypt give us bits and fragments of dynasties and royal lines. The Annals of Ireland give genealogies. Clay tablets, or old manuscripts or papyrus scrolls salvaged from the Great Library of Alexandria were used. Essentially anywhere and everywhere that family lines and relationships can be found is all fair game. And it's certainly the case that many contradictions, inconsistencies and impossibilities come to bear. There has always been plenty of incentive for people to engineer and contrive pedigrees of descent from royalty where objectively there was none. But what I have done personally is just to accrue and compile as much as I can from home on the internet - trying to assemble it all into a coherent, self-consistent ancestor tree as much as possible. So there certainly are many deviations from reality. Certainly it is not all objectively true. The tree as a whole is only as accurate as the fidelity of the original sources. So I hereby give you the following disclaimer, which also appears on every page of the books I've printed out:

"The relations herein shown are only displayed with as much accuracy as possible. The author feels this family tree to be about 95% correct in its entirety, but should be viewed as more of a guideline for future research than as 100% literal truth." (Note: most of the tree occurs within the last 1000 years of present, so on the average perhaps 95% is plausible? Obviously as you go back further, a claim of 95% accuracy is flat-out ridiculous when you're in territory of myth and legend.

      That said, this family tree is clearly a lot more than my own personal family tree - it is all of humanity's. Is it any reason to get a big head because I can claim I am directly descended from King Edward I "the Longshanks" of England, and William Wallace, and Robert de Brus and the whole host of other characters from Braveheart? No. Everyone is descended from all these same royal families and dynasties. It's long been known in the genealogical community that if you have any European ancestry at all, it is mathematically certain you are a direct descendant of Charlemagne. Or to phrase it more correctly, the probability that you are NOT a direct descendant is so close to zero that within some confidence interval, we can be 99.99% confident that statistically yada yada blah blah etc etc.. <insert statistical analysis here>. I recall reading from several sources that,

"...If one goes back far enough in time, approximately 80% of the individuals are ancestors of everyone in the current generation, with the remaining 20% having no descendants in the current generation...(Chang 1999)"

      Which is to say that while you are descended from Charlemagne and royalty, you are also descended from ~80% of the entire population from across that slice of time, while all descendants from the other ~20% have gone extinct. Note that this statistic comes with the condition that progeny is modeled as a Poisson distribution. So it's nothing special that we're descended from royalty - you are, I am, and so is everyone else. The only question is are you dedicated enough to trace it? Now that the genealogical community has had the benefit of the internet for several decades, some really interesting phenomena are beginning to emerge. My tree back in 2009 might possibly have been the world's largest coherent unified ancestor tree in existence. Or maybe not, but even if it was or is, it won't be for long. Someone can simply take it and add a few more ancestors, and poof, now theirs is the biggest. I haven't really kept up with genealogy since 2009, but it appears to me there are some mega-gigantic world family tree projects being assembled and compiled democratically from many remote participants and contributors. In an emergent, bottom-up, open-source kind of way, these things are being built up in the online community, and soon enough my huge tree that took me literally thousands of hours to construct will be obsolete. So for whatever it's worth, that's why I'm trying to publishing it now instead of sitting all alone on a hard drive.

Continued on page 6.

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A Family Tree of all Mankind - part 4

Inbreeding.
      Let's pick an extreme case of royalty inbreeding. If Anna Gevedon's tree made you cringe, observe the pedigree of King Charles II of Spain, last of the Habsburg dynasty:

 
      This amount of inbreeding was pretty incredible. The effects were so bad that Charles II was handicapped from genetic mutations. It's no coincidence he was the LAST of the Habsburg dynasty to rule. It just doesn't get any worse than this. Or does it? Turns out it does. Here is a pedigree of an ancient Egyptian royal line that I have picked out of the tree. It begins with 155th great-grandfather Unas (Oenas), Pharaoh of Egypt in 2375 BC and shows the next 20 descending generations within the central ruling family, ending with Senebtisi Queen of Egypt in about 1800 BC who was our 135th great grandmother. (Quick math check for plausibility: 3800 years / 137 = 27.7 years per generation). Remember I said the average was 28.5. This was about 4000 years ago and as King of Egypt, you were a God literally. It was traditional to marry your half-sister to keep your divinity in the family, and this happened for many generations.

 
      There are also many biblical examples of incestuous relationships - in particular, the well known story of Lot (tree link) in Chapter Genesis of the tree. But compared to what we've just seen within the royal dynasties of ancient Egypt, none of that really has much shock value in comparison.

Continued on page 5.

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A Family Tree of all Mankind - part 3

Pedigree Collapse.

      So follow along with me in this thought experiment: Consider yourself as the trunk of your personal ancestor tree that gets bigger as time goes back and you have 2 parents, and 4 grandparents etc, and if you go back n generations, then there are 2^n ancestors. Not all of those ancestors are known to you, but nevertheless you DID HAVE an ancestor in every slot of your pedigree. If one were to go back enough generations(n) to where the amount of ancestors(2^n) at the time was larger than the total number of people even living in the appropriate cultural location of the world at the time, clearly this basic exponential model breaks down. It's a good enough approximation for most small family trees, but insufficient for large ones. That's where pedigree collapse comes in. Pedigree collapse is essentially a nice term and synonym for inbreeding. Pedigree collapse happens in everyone's family tree, and it's a mathematical fact and a certainty that we are all inbred. So get over it. It is a fact that every human being on Earth is a cousin to every other human being on Earth. Your parents were cousins before they were married. My parents are cousins. Everyone's parents are cousins. My wife and I are cousins. YOU are MY cousin, and I can say that with 100% certainty without even knowing who you (the reader) are. Pedigree collapse occurs at every union of man and woman, so the inbreeding issue is not whether we are related, but only how closely are we related. For kicks, here's an article I saw that explains how we're all much more closely related than most realize. So mathematically we understand why pedigree collapse must happen, but what does that actually look like in a family tree? Let's consider the pedigree of one Anna Gevedon - a 4th great-grandmother born in 1822. Her parents were first cousins. And each of her parents' parents were also cousins with each other. And as you go back further, I have trouble even describing it. It's easier just to see with a chart:

      Now that's a pretty close family. This is back in Kentucky/Virgina by the way. So how many Ancestors does Anna Gevedon have? Well she has 2 parents and 4 grandparents - so far so good. But she has only 6 g-grandparents instead of the usual 8. She actually has nine g-g-grandparents instead of the usual 16 (Try to count them). And 5 generations back she has 16 ancestors instead of the usual 32! This is what pedigree collapse looks like. Anna Gevedon could have had 32 different unique ancestors 5 generations back, but she doesn't - she has 16. Of course she has 32 slots to be filled in on her pedigree chart, it's just that multiple spaces are filled by the same individuals. In the case of Anna Gevedon's ancestors, I think we can agree inbreeding was a little excessive. But how much is excessive? What does that even mean, and compared to what? To assert that inbreeding is "excessive" is just an opinion coming from the values we've had given to us from the society we are presently in.. and also the marriage laws of whatever State you're from. But society hasn't always been the same way it is now. Consider people that lived 500 years ago or more. People traveled much less back then, and many people actually lived out their entire lives within a few miles of where they were born. Not to mention there were less people in total. Furthermore, literacy and record keeping weren't good, so people may not have even known they were marrying a relative. So for a multitude of reasons, it is certain that inbreeding was much more common in the past than it is today. For the aristocracy too; they especially had the incentives to marry other aristocrats and keep wealth in the family. In a society where everyone was looking to marry "up" in social status, the result can be seen in the genealogies. Within a family tree, inbreeding manifests itself as massive pedigree collapse during the time of aristocratic rule in Europe, and then even more so further back in feudalism where land holdings were tied directly to politics. Remember people didn't marry for love, but Kings married off their daughters to other Kings for the purposes of political alliance. This brings up an important detail about my family tree project. Who does history remember well from 1000 years ago? Aristocrats. Who does history NOT remember so well from 1000 years ago? Everyone else - the peasants and regular folk whom made up the majority of the population. Any further back than a few centuries ago, and my tree is populated almost exclusively by the rich and the affluent. Deep-time family trees like this have what I call Aristocracy Bias or Royalty Bias. The data available to genealogists and historians is heavily biased in favor of kings, queens, lords, dukes, earls, barons etc. That does not mean that we aren't descended from the whole lot of peasants and everyone else across a population. Of course we are. We just have little hope of tracing down their names or relationships because that information is forever lost to the depths of history. So the poor were marrying amongst themselves and having children in small local communities, not travelling very far, while the aristocrats and royalty were marrying amongst themselves separately from the poor, and travelling much further on average. As royalty from different regions all strove to interbreed with each other, they also had more surviving children than did the poor, but only a portion of those children born to wealthy parents remained in the wealthy gene pool. Typically the eldest male child inherited estate, while the other siblings had to make their own way in life, and their descendants tended to trickle down into the ranks of the poor. Seen from the perspective of a genealogist, the aristocracy was like a one-way machine, generating a constant out-flux of progeny with trees of descent that spread out into the lower class and then fade away. It appears that the reverse did not tend to happen. Within my tree, rarely do we ever see it show anyone of common origins rising up into the ranks of the wealthy. But then again, if that did tend to happen how would we know? Since history doesn't record those ancestral lines very far. So it is important to understand that while history remembers the rich and forgets the poor, inbreeding and pedigree collapse occurred in both.

Continued on page 4.

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A Family Tree of all Mankind - part 2

     So this project begins egocentrically perhaps, with myself in the present (I did say I included my wife's ancestors too, but for simplicity let's ignore that for now). And I list my 2 parents, and then 4 grandparents, and then 8 great-grandparents etc.. and so on and so forth, as far back as I am able to go along all possible lines. For clarity let me throw up a quick diagram to show the trunk of the tree - the focal point of the whole project:

     To be pedantic about it, the above tree isn't the best example, because each generation there is shown circularly outward from the trunk. A better way to envision the tree is to get each generation lined up with itself horizontally like so:

      That's more like it. And in that flat-topped-tree style, here's what my actual data looks like out to four generations:

 

   

      So let's break out some math because we're going to need it. If you continue building up a tree in this manner, it doesn't take very long before it gets BIG. It's growth is exponential with the base of 2. One generation back you have 2^1 = 2 ancestors. Two generations back you have 2^2 = 4 ancestors. Three generations back you have 2^3 = 8 ancestors. etc... So n generations back you will have 2^n ancestors. (Note: This is valid for zero generations too because 2^0 = 1. Isn't math neat?) This of course is true only if all the ancestors are known and entered into the tree. Obviously, the further back in time you go, the less "complete" your ancestor tree will be. So my tree grows less slowly than 2^n, and you might say 2^n is an upper bound. But still it explodes pretty rapidly. This looks like a good place to link the Chapter One portion of the book I printed out back in 2009. I worked so hard to make it look neat and perfect back then, but now since I've done more research and developed the tree further, it's not as complete as my current version... which I am unable to provide at this time for technical reasons. But it's now roughly twice as big, and terminates in 13 gateway ancestors that begin my Chapter 2 - Middle Ages. This Chapter one linked here terminates in only 4 "gateway ancestors" that I had known at the time. Note: I'm now up to 13 gateway ancestors which are shown at the bottom of my roadmap/diagram. Obviously my Chapter 2 here from 2009 is outdated also, but I'm not going to make another pdf of it. There's nothing fundamentally important or unique about the gateway ancestors in the real world. Their selection is totally dependent upon the topology of my tree based on the particular nodes and connections within it. They are the easiest way that I know, how to cut or sever the tree between chapters one and two.

Continued on page 3.

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A Family Tree of all Mankind - part 1

What does the family tree of all of humanity look like?

      This series of posts is dedicated to displaying my family tree that I've researched and compiled over the course of about 10 years. I began roughly in 2002, and worked on this project on and off until 2009 when I reached a good stopping point and attempted to print out a book. But soon I discovered more ancestors and began adding them in again, and I also got married and started adding in my wife's ancestors too, so by 2012 my tree had grown about twice as big. Anything I had previously printed out - all the pretty looking pdfs, trees, and charts etc. were already outdated. My book printing ambitions didn't work out so well anyway. I got the first chapter out, and some of the smaller last chapters out, but I got hung up on the massive lump in the middle. You see the problem is, that this tree is so ridiculously massively huge and complex, that working with it seriously borders along insanity. After literal reams of paper and ink I finally realized that it doesn't make sense to strive to produce a physically printed-out copy of the tree in any form, be it book, or chart or any two dimensional format conceivable. The best way for it to be displayed is on the internet within a hyperlinked network. Which I DID do once, on a different website which subsequently crashed. And it took such a ridiculous amount of time to create, that for technical reasons that no one wants to hear, it is not currently available. Most of this text in these blogs here are copied from my other website, so I apologize for any links that are still dead. But even without the actual interactive tree, I still recommend anyone to keep reading this dialogue to understand it. There are insights to be gleaned here that I know nearly everyone misunderstands about evolution and ancestry.

      First, let me tell you about what this project looks like. This tree in its entirety is STRICTLY AN ASCENDING TREE, as opposed to a descending one. Most people think of a family tree as starting from some individual in the past and mapping out his or her descendants. That is a descending tree, and indeed most family trees are of the descending genre, or maybe a combination of both. But this one is an ascending tree. I'm going to say it again, because I cannot stress the importance of this enough. My family tree is an ASCENDING tree ONLY. And as such, EVERY person herein named is a direct ancestor with a direct and complete unbroken line all the way to myself in the present. That means they are a great^n-grandfather or a great^n-grandmother directly. And anyone who does not meet the criteria of being a direct ancestor is omitted. If a family relation is known but they are an uncle, aunt, cousin, or sibling, they are not incuded (unless they are also an ancestor). This is necessary because I can only devote so much time to this project, and I have to draw the line somewhere. In addition to the ancestors' names, this tree also contains info (if it is known) for the date of birth, location of birth, date of marriage, location of marriage, date of death, location of death, and one other data entry called "aka". There are no photos or other media. No history nor stories are given about the lives of the individuals - just the bare bones here. I used the Family Tree Maker 2005 software to compile it all, but it is displayed here as an archive of HTML pages with a network of links, produced via a GEDCOM. Some statistics of the project:

Number of different unique individuals: 24,523. (ancestors only)
Total number of marriages: 9,126.
Average lifespan: 55 years, 7 months.
Longest line of generations: 186.
Average time in between generations: 28.5 years.
Earliest listed ancestors: Adam and Eve.
Total number of different surnames: 8,245.
Amount of skepticism you probably have right now: A lot.

Family Tree Maker 2005 only allows me to work with a maximum of 99 generations at a time. And it irritatingly also will not handle dates prior to 100 AD, so the "date" entries for those earlier times are found in the Location field instead.

Here (and also below) is a rough road-map sketch to help guide you around a bit (This will be useful to "see" what the tree looks like as a whole, but I understand it's a bit overwhelming. I will explain this better as we go). Also you may download my master-index of all named ancestors in a Microsoft word .rtf format to help navigate if you like (This will not at all be useful anymore, since the interactive tree isn't here).

Follow along with me in this dialogue and I'll take you on a tour of the whole project, while providing potentially paradigm challenging insights and occasionally controversial commentary!

Continued on page 2.

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