[Avodah] Your Ancestors

[Micha Berger]

On Sat, Dec 09, 2017 at 06:27:13PM +0200, Simon Montagu via Avodah wrote:
: >      The answer, for people of European descent at least, is surprisingly
: >      recent: 600 years. The common ancestor for every single person alive
: >      on the planet today, no matter where, lived approximately 3,600 years
: >      ago. That means Confucius, Nefertiti, Socrates, and any figure from
: >      ancient history that had children, is in some way your ancestor.

: Unless I'm missing something, those last two sentences are a huge non
: sequitur.

The author is just saying that the same model that giver the result
of 600 years for Euopeans gives a result of 3,600 for all of humanity.

: I have a slightly different take-away from the article: it says that
: everybody has a common ancestor who lived approximately 3,600 years ago.
: Isn't that exactly what the Torah says?

Well, really the model says that everyone who is alive today almost
certainly (this is statistics, after all) descended from everyone who
was alive 3,600 who has /any/ living descendents.

Not that there was one such ancestor.

Gut Voch!
-Micha

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