[cardguy]

I thought of something awhile ago - but have never seen it mentioned.

Basically - if you ever become interested in studying your family tree. You are best only paying attention to the female side of the family.

So - you have your mum, then her mum, then her mum, then her mum and so on...

Since - as soon as a woman cuckolds her husband - it throws off the male line of descent forever. So - when you go back a few generations - there is a fair chance than paternity fraud will fool you into thinking you are related to somebody that you are not.

Just a small pointer. I don't really pay attention to family trees much since when you go back about 6 generations - you have as many genes in common with a complete stranger as you do with that distant relative.

[Fitzgerald]

Agreed. I have a friend who's family lineage he'd traced back to Robert The Bruce, which he took pride in. I didn't have the heart to tell him that with the statistical chance of cuckoldry, applied over the last thousand years, it was pretty much a zero% chance that he was actually genetically related to RtheB.

I'd learned a little bit about my family geneaology recently, and was surprised to find out two of the families in my tree had been inbreeding (south central US), ha. Some things you just don't want to know, folks.

[Architekt]

In an Anne Rice novel, one of the original vampires was some gypsy lady who traced her family history throughout her whole life (she's immortal of course), but only through the women - for that specific reason. And yeah, go back enough generations, and probably 90+% of us here will have at least some relative in common. I was looking at my family tree the other day and traced it back through all sorts of royalty 100s to 1000s of years ago. It got a bit weird when I found that my ancestors supposedly came straight out of Norse mythology...

[Volk]

Not a chance here. It has been impossible to trace back more than 3 generations.

[cardguy]

I don't understand family trees. Since when you go back about 200(?) generations - you have more relatives than there were people alive.

For those interested check some of these articles out. Apparently everyone alive is descended from Confucious. And everyone in Europe is descended from Charlemagne (the first Holy Roman Emperor).

http://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/arch...we/302497/

Also - Stephen Fry makes an interesting point that is worth mentioning since it is something that alot of people overlook:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OamQy8wc2XE&t=7m10s

[Basil Ransom]

You're all mostly talking out of your ass. A study in Britain found a cuckoldry rate of 1.3% per generation ( http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC1288207/ ). At 40 generations of 25 year average length, i.e. 1000 years, there's a 60% chance of being the descendant of your supposed 1000 year old ancestor.

More: http://blogs.discovermagazine.com/gnxp/2...opulation/

"I don't understand family trees. Since when you go back about 200(?) generations - you have more relatives than there were people alive."

Because at some point, your grand*8-father was fucking your eighth cousin.

[Architekt]

(07-03-2013 12:49 PM)basilransom Wrote:  

You're all mostly talking out of your ass. A study in Britain found a cuckoldry rate of 1.3% per generation ( http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC1288207/ ). At 40 generations of 25 year average length, i.e. 1000 years, there's a 60% chance of being the descendant of your supposed 1000 year old ancestor.

More: http://blogs.discovermagazine.com/gnxp/2...opulation/

"I don't understand family trees. Since when you go back about 200(?) generations - you have more relatives than there were people alive."

Because at some point, your grand*8-father was fucking your eighth cousin.

This. There's probably a lot more incestuous activity going on in history than most people would like to think about. As for our last common ancester (the one everyone is related to), this person is estimated to have lived between 5000-10000 years ago - some time between the end of the last ice age and the beginning of Ancient Egypt's rise.