Are We All Related? Science Says Yes, and It's Weirder Than You Think.

Oct 25, 2025
3 min read

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Think about your family tree. You have two parents. Four grandparents. Eight great-grandparents. It seems simple enough, just a neat pyramid balancing on your head. Keep going, and 10 generations back, you've got over a thousand ancestors. No big deal.

But let's keep going. If you double that number every generation, just 40 generations ago you’d have a trillion ancestors. All living at the same time. That’s more people than have ever been alive. It's more stars than are in our galaxy. The math is clear. Something is very, very wrong with this picture.

So where are all your missing ancestors? The truth is, your family tree isn't a tree at all. It’s more like a wreath. For most of human history, people's options were limited to who was nearby. This means people frequently paired up with someone who already shared a distant ancestor. This "inbreeding" isn't as scandalous as it sounds; it just means our family trees fold back on themselves. The really wild part? Fancy math shows that every human alive today shares a single common ancestor who lived only about 3,000 years ago.