Genealogy and Pedigree Collapse
Discussions focus on how family trees overlap due to pedigree collapse, resulting in shared distant ancestors, common relatedness like sixth cousins, and exponential ancestor counts exceeding historical populations, with references to DNA tests and historical lineages.
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You should read up on family trees. This is an extremely well known thing and you can find a lot of articles that answer this question.
No, your ancestors were distant relatives, 2nd cousins etc...
Stop press: everyone may descend from a single ancestor!
Just to get pedantic, aren't we all relatives if you go back 1000+ years?
Does ancestry.com have this info?
All human beings are related if you go back a sufficient number of years.
There's evidence my ancestors have not. sigh.
We are all basically sixth cousins from what I've seen written.
Many of the people reading this thread are descendants of at least one Neanderthal. Family trees aren't trees, they're DAG.
This 3% or whatever from 0.5^n is a lower bound. To get close to it, all your other relatives would need to come from completely somewhere else. But in reality, many of your other ancestors were probably related to him, because they had lived in his valley since they invented farming, or whatever. So you probably have some more of his genes from several great, great, great grandmothers who were related to him.