1,099,511,627,776
Now, that's a large number. No, it's not the daily national debt, it's the number of ancestors you have in 40 generations. At 25 years per generation you'd have that many "grandparents" in 1000 years. Since the number above (which represents 2 times 2 and that number times 2 for a total of 40 cycles) is more than all humans alive, ever alive, and probably ever to be alive, there is either a lot of incest going on or the average years between generations is more like 60. Since we know that the average age of child bearing has been less than 25 years over our the history of humans, something is amiss. Yet, we have just been told that the "original ancestor" has been genetically located and is at least 2000 years in our past and possibly as much as 5000 years back. If we try to find how many ancestors we would have had in 2000 years at a 25 year birth cycle, the number is totally impracticable and must be bogus somehow. Considering a lower birth cycle, each of us will have more than 2 trillion "grandparents" over the last 1000 years. The only way to tighten this up to real terms is to inbreed at a very high level. Sounds like Abraham and Sarah (she was reported as his half sister) is not an unreasonable hint about the breeding system of our past. To marry someone reasonably unrelated to you it might be required that you marry a Bushman (or woman) from an isolated tribe in Africa. Even then.....
To have a "family pedigree" hanging on the wall that shows you have great thinkers, leaders, kings, queens, or even notorious criminals in your past seems simple. Just go back about 800 or so years, choose whomever you wish and you'll be grabbing an ancestor. That is unless inbreeding, incest, and so on has been the norm. As I suppose it must be. It's either that or there were a few trillion people running amock on the planet that we are unaware of and it's possible that this was true and aliens simply have been feeding on the excess and covering up the evidence. Hmmmmm.
According to the "science" of the reports on our ancestors, if you go back a few thousand years, the first person you would meet (no matter who or where) would be an ancestor. So, I'm a relative of all those people that Moses lead out of Egypt as well as all of the people of Egypt at the time. This would make those fleeing related to those chasing (and ultimately drowned in the Red Sea). Family problems don't seem to have been any better then than now.
The whole thing is such a mess when the numbers are taken into account. I'm not ready to believe that the original ancestor was from the China/Malasia area any more than I'm ready to believe I've got about 2 trillion "grandparents" a thousand years ago. I'll just consider this work on ancestors a "work in progress" and wait for more reasonable information.
