
Half of Western European men descended from one Bronze Age ‘king’ - mjbellantoni
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/science/2016/04/25/half-of-british-men-descended-from-one-bronze-age-king
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empath75
This is such a weird article. Literally anybody from 4000 years ago that has
any living descendants is going to be a common ancestor of most of the planet.
That's just math. Whoever this person was probably wasn't special and probably
wasn't a king.

~~~
madaxe_again
Came here to say the same. It's the same fallacy when people go "did you know
there was once only one woman? Mitochondrial dna proves it!".

If anything, the prevalence of one family of haplogroups just underscores a
lack of genetic drift, which is what you'd expect from a rapidly growing
population due to improvements in technology. The bigger the breeding
population the more likely that mutations are drowned out by the prevalent
alleles. Isolated populations drift, and mutations propagate more rapidly
within them to become universal. If anything, it points to a potential
bottleneck 4000 years ago, but not necessarily.

If anyone's got a link to the paper it might shed some light on what was
actually described...

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imron
Eventually you are either the ancestor of everyone on earth or the ancestor of
no-one.

~~~
d13
I'm confused too. You only need to go back 30 generations until you have 1.07
billion ancestors:
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Most_recent_common_ancestor](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Most_recent_common_ancestor).
That means any old bones we dig up that are over about 4,000 years old will
almost certainly be one of our relatives. Can anyone the article's
significance in this context?

~~~
jsnell
If only half the population in Europe shared a most common ancestor 4000 years
back, that would be absolutely shocking. But this article is misleading, and
that's not what the research says.

It's actually not about ancestry in general, but purely about patrilinear
ancestry [0], which doesn't have the same kind of fan-out. If you go 30
generations back, you might have a billion ancestors, but only 30 patrilinear
ones.

[0] That's the measurement they have to make. We have technology to measure
patrilinear ancestry through the Y chromosome, and matrilinear ancestry
through the mitochondrial DNA. But there is no way of doing the same for
ancestry in general.

~~~
maxander
> But there is no way of doing the same for ancestry in general.

Uh, sure there is- apply the same techniques to non-Y, non-mitochondrial
chromosomes.

~~~
jsnell
I don't think you can apply the same techniques, since they depend on a
special property of the Y-chromosome and mitochondrial DNA: they are not
affected by sexual reproduction, only by mutations.

~~~
maxander
Huh, you're right- studies on the altogether most recent human common ancestor
are all based on pure statistics. I'd thought that genetic recombination could
be accounted for, since its not as though genetic information (and the
mutations therein) are being _lost_ in the process, but apparently no one's
found a way to do this yet. Interesting... ! :)

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mjbellantoni
There was similar news a few years ago relating how a large percentage of the
world is descended from Genghis Khan:

* [http://blogs.discovermagazine.com/gnxp/2010/08/1-in-200-men-...](http://blogs.discovermagazine.com/gnxp/2010/08/1-in-200-men-direct-descendants-of-genghis-khan)

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yitchelle
Coincidentally, I was just reading about how Genghis Khan was supposed to have
directly lineage to 1 in 200 of world's male population. That study was in
2010.

[http://blogs.discovermagazine.com/gnxp/2010/08/1-in-200-men-...](http://blogs.discovermagazine.com/gnxp/2010/08/1-in-200-men-
direct-descendants-of-genghis-khan)

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GunboatDiplomat
The Indo-European expansions?

