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PaperclipPerfector  3mo ago (text post)   28623 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of February 19, 2024

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The claim above is nonsense, but not nonsense for the reason you are saying. 5,000-15,000 years is roughly the time for all humans to share ancestors. Plus the identical ancestors point doesn't mean those people were your ancestors, it's either they were your ancestor or have no living descendents today.

However just because you share ancestors doesn't mean you get DNA from them in equal amounts, or that you even get DNA from them at all (for context given how recombination works you have ancestors a mere 500 years ago you don't carry any DNA from, indeed you don't carry any DNA from almost all of your ancestors 500 years ago). From the Wikipedia page on the identical ancestors point (I recommend reading it) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Identical_ancestors_point

All living people share exactly the same set of ancestors before the Identical Ancestors Point, all the way to the very first single-celled organism.[3] However, people will vary widely in how much ancestry and genes they inherit from each ancestor, which will cause them to have very different genotypes and phenotypes.

This is illustrated in the 2003 simulation as follows: considering the ancestral populations alive at 5000 BC, close to the ACA point, a modern-day Japanese person will get 88.4% of their ancestry from Japan, and most of the remainder from China or Korea, with only 0.00049% traced to Norway; conversely, a modern-day Norwegian will get over 92% of their ancestry from Norway (or over 96% from Scandinavia) and only 0.00044% from Japan.

Thus, even though the Norwegian and Japanese person share the same set of ancestors, these ancestors appear in their family tree in dramatically different proportions. A Japanese person in 5000 BC with present-day descendants will likely appear trillions of times in a modern-day Japanese person's family tree, but might appear only one time in a Norwegian person's family tree. A 5000 BC Norwegian person will similarly appear far more times in a typical Norwegian person's family tree than they will appear in a Japanese person's family tree.

Add in the fact that somone who appears only once in your family tree 7000 years ago has basically a < 10^-50 (or thereabouts) chance of contributing DNA to you living today we can pretty safely say that modern Japanese people do not have any genetic ancestry from Norwegians because as I said above geneological ancestry and genetic ancestry are not the same.

The differing proportions in how much of your ancestors were living in place X vs Y at the identical ancestors point still lead to large scale group geographic phenotypic differences, even though everyone has the same ancestors (as a set, but not in proportion of their genetics that made it down to you) not too far back in the past.

Honestly someone who knows about the identical ancestors point but then does not mention the differing proportions is sending off a massive red flag that they are acting in bad faith because they are absolutely smart/well read enough to know better. I wouldn't trust much of whatever else comes after they wrote that.

That feels impossible. From a quick google:

Mitochondrial Eve and Y-chromosomal Adam — two individuals who passed down a portion of their genomes to the vast expanse of humanity — are known as our most recent common ancestors, or MRCAs. But many aspects of their existence, including when they lived, are shrouded in mystery.

Now, a study led by the Stanford University School of Medicine indicates the two roughly overlapped during evolutionary time: The man lived between 120,000 and 156,000 years ago, and the woman lived between 99,000 and 148,000 years ago.

I think the ~5k-15k number is a theoretical number that one comes up with if one ignores selection, geographical barriers, and anything else that makes mating not some kind of random walk.

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