BootsnAll Travel Community

I found this article and interesting read.

Exerpts:

"Whoever it was probably lived a few thousand years ago, somewhere in East Asia -- Taiwan, Malaysia and Siberia all are likely locations. He -- or she -- did nothing more remarkable than be born, live, have children and die. Yet this was the ancestor of every person now living on Earth -- the last person in history whose family tree branches out to touch all 6.5 billion people on the planet today.

"'It's a mathematical certainty that that person existed,' said Steve Olson. With the help of a statistician, a computer scientist and a supercomputer, Olson has calculated just how interconnected the human family tree is. You would have to go back in time only 2,000 to 5,000 years -- and probably on the low side of that range -- to find somebody who could count every person alive today as a descendant.

"Furthermore, Olson and his colleagues have found that if you go back a little farther -- about 5,000 to 7,000 years ago -- everybody living today has exactly the same set of ancestors. In other words, every person who was alive at that time is either an ancestor to all 6 billion people living today, or their line died out and they have no remaining descendants.

"It also means that all of us have ancestors of every color and creed. Every Palestinian suicide bomber has Jews in his past. Every Sunni Muslim in Iraq is descended from at least one Shiite. And every Klansman's family has African roots."

An interesting thought for sure. And open to many interpretations.

I’m sorry but the timescale here makes no sense. We know from the writings of ancient Greeks and Romans that 2000 yrs ago there were distinct racial groups in Europe, Africa and Asia. Archaeological evidence suggests that the first humans to enter America crossed the “Bering Land Bridge” some 17k years ago and then were cut off from the “old world” about 11k years ago when rising sea levels flooded the Bering Straits. Similarly the Australian Aborigines are believed to have landed on that continent an estimated 40k yrs ago. Neither group could have interbred with peoples of the "old world" within that time.

What the article may be referring to is mitochondrial Eve who lived 200,000 yrs ago:

It still makes your point because 200k yrs is actually v small in evolutionary terms (given a species that takes a long time to mature as we do) and people are not that diverse under the skin!

I agree with autumleaf. I've been following National Geographic's Genographic Project which has much higher numbers...although draws the same conclusion. Cool stuff.