[Kevin]

Originally Posted by sbfinley

The title of this thread reminded me of an article on genealogy I read awhile back. Essentially there is a period of time, continentally about 1,000 years, where if you trace back to any random person living at that time there is a 80% chance you are descended from that person in some manner. The basis is that with every generation your number of ancestors doubles but the number of actual ancestors remains static and eventually they reach an equilibrium. So if you are of European decent you can take any living person from roughly 1,000 years ago (Charlemagne, Eric the Red, William I, or any random person slain in the Norman conquest) and by math there is an 80% chance you can trace - should such records exist - your genealogy back to find that person in your family tree.

Should that be true it’s interesting to me that my descendants a millennium from now could read about Babe Ruth, Tom Seaver, Bryce Harper, and Hawk Tuah Girl and probably be distantly related to most of them.

I believe it was a RadioLab episode where the host stated if you go back to 700 AD, we are all related.