Another Ancestor Paradox

2025-04-10

[public] 131K views, 18.3K likes, dislikes audio only

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There is a point in human history where everyone alive at the time fits into one of two categories: Either they are the ancestor of nobody alive today, or they are an ancestor of everyone alive today because of how genealogy and genetic lineages work – and it is much more recent than you think.

LEARN MORE

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To learn more about this topic, start your googling with these keywords:

- Identical ancestors point: the most recent point in a population's past where each individual alive then is either the ancestor of every individual alive now or has no currently living descendants.

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CREDITS

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Cameron Duke | Script Writer, Narrator and Director

Arcadi Garcia i Rius | Storyboard Artist

Sarah Berman | Illustration, Video Editing and Animation

Nathaniel Schroeder | Music

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Lizah van der Aart • Sarah Berman • Cameron Duke

Arcadi Garcia i Rius • David Goldenberg • Melissa Hayes

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REFERENCES

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Chang, Joseph T. “Recent Common Ancestors of All Present-Day Individuals.” Advances in Applied Probability, vol. 31, no. 4, 1 Dec. 1999, pp. 1002–1026, https://doi.org/10.1239/aap/1029955256

Rohde, Douglas L. T., et al. “Modelling the Recent Common Ancestry of All Living Humans.” Nature, vol. 431, no. 7008, 1 Sept. 2004, pp. 562–566, www.nature.com/articles/nature02842, https://doi.org/10.1038/nature02842