Why You're Related to Everybody Else

this video is made possible by brilliant start learning intuitively with brilliant for 20% off by being one of the first 200 people to sign up by clicking the link in the description think for a moment about every single person you've ever met in your life then think about everybody you've ever heard of and finally think about everybody alive on the planet right now no matter how far away or close all of these people may seem including me talking to you right now through this video all of us are related to you and all of you are related to me so how can this be using some very simple math we can take a glance at your family tree you obviously had two parents and your parents each had two parents of their own which means you have four grandparents you have eight great-grandparents and this number doubles each generation you go back just five generations ago or 125 years before the date you were born you theoretically would have had 32 ancestors living on earth at that time however going back a thousand years before you were born or forty generations ago you would find with this math that you would have over a trillion ancestors living in the Middle Ages which is more people than have ever existed in all of time combined obviously there's a variable we haven't accounted for in these calculations yet and that variable is incest a lot of it for most of human history the only people somebody may ever really meet were the people in their local village town or tribe this obviously limited the dating pool to just a handful of options and those options often included people like cousins not all of your ancestors are unique to only you or your family if you compare your family tree with your friends tree and you go back far enough you'll see the shape of the tree slowly vanish and see something that resembles more of a web as you draw your two webs out you'll eventually find a common ancestor between yourselves at some point which would make you both distantly related the further back in time we go the more common ancestors all of us end up having about 0.5% of the modern human population can claim direct ancestry from Genghis Khan largely in the region of Asia between China and Uzbekistan going even further nearly anybody with European ancestry can trace their origins to the same group of ancestors roughly 1,000 years ago this means that statistically if you have European ancestry anybody living in Europe around the ninth century who had children and grandchildren is one of your direct ancestors meaning that since Charlemagne had 18 kids he's most likely somewhere in your family web but who is the most recent person that all of us alive on earth watching this video can mutually trace all of our ancestors back to this person is known as the most recent common ancestor or MRCA and he or she is believed to have existed not terribly long ago they may have existed as recently as just 300 BCE just after the conquests of Alexander the Great and they almost certainly lived somewhere in East Asia in either come Chaka Japan Taiwan or Indonesia this person had amazing reproductive success and was likely a merchant that traveled extensively with their offspring venturing off and creating their own offspring over time in the far-flung parts of the world like the Americas and Australia this single human who lived there in this time is the direct ancestor of every single person alive today which links all of us together in the giant family web that we call humanity but it doesn't mean that MRCA was the first person to have children nor does it mean that nobody else alive then has direct descendants today there are many MRCA is simply the first person in world history who can count universal descendants today but many of our ancestors live significantly further in the past than they a nine thousand year old skeleton dubbed cheddar man was discovered in a cave near the English city of cheddar back in 1903 recent DNA analysis of the remains revealed something astonishing 9,000 years and 300 generations later cheddar man has a direct descendant living today and he only lives half a mile away from the side of the cave and teaches history if you rewind the clock even further back it's possible that 70,000 years ago the entire global population of humans may have shrunk to as little as 10,000 people that's only a ninth of the seating capacity at Wembley Stadium and then when you consider those few people were spread out across Africa and Eurasia you remember what I said earlier most people only ever dated people who lived nearby because they literally had no other options we all share multiple common ancestors that all of us can claim to be descended from it's just that that person in 300 BC II is the most recent one that all of us can claim if you think about it in terms like this if you fail to have children you're the first person in an unbroken chain going back hundreds of thousands of years to fail to do so in fact it's even more serious than that when you consider the most recent common ancestor of all living things today this organism is known as the last Universal common ancestor or Luca for short Luca is believed to have existed 3.5 to 3.8 billion years ago and everything that's alive on earth right now from you and me to bananas that annoying mosquito Greg and the bacteria on your face are all direct descendants of it when you think like that if you fail to reproduce during your life you're the first organism in an unbroken chain going back over three billion years to fail and that may make your ancient ancestor Luca rather sad but what's interesting about all of this is that if you go back far enough not only is all of humanity one giant interconnected family but all of life itself on earth is just one incomprehensible huge interconnected family so the next time you stomp on that bug or SWAT that mosquito remember that you both are technically part of the same big family the origins of humanity and life itself are as mysterious as they are interesting but they're still prising amount that we actually know using math we can calculate certain things like where your ancestors probably originated from and we can come up with theories like who all of us are directly descended from the scientists that work to figure all of these things out are like detectives investigating thousand year old crime scenes that literally impact all of us today and the computational biology course at brilliant will explain to you how all of it works and why it affects you personally the course has an entire section dedicated to human ancestry that this video was heavily influenced by brilliant as I'm sure you know by now is the best place to learn about complex topics because they teach you the intuitive ideas behind them so you understand how it all works together rather than just memorizing phrases if you want to become the kind of person who can explain where your ancestors came from going back thousands of years based on your own genetic evidence then brilliant is the right place for you as they have courses not only on that but on plenty of other interesting topics like computer science artificial neural networks or logic but best of all you can take as many of these incredibly design courses as you want with their premium subscription which by being one of the first 200 people to sign up by clicking on the link in the description you can get for 20% off [Music]

Channel: RealLifeLore

Views: 1,369,869

Rating: 4.8842545 out of 5

Keywords: real life lore, real life lore maps, real life lore geography, real life maps, world map, world map is wrong, world map with countries, world map real size, map of the world, world geography, geography, geography (field of study), facts you didn’t know, how many ancestors do you have, related, evolution, are we all related, why you're related to everybody else, human ancestry, all humans related, who am I related to, related to someone famous

Id: KgQFeq6tNcw

Length: 7min 58sec (478 seconds)

Published: Sat Sep 08 2018

Reddit Comments

[u/XBxGxBx]

Another interesting tidbit from this video is that a 9,000 year old skull was found in a cave in England and a direct descendant from that long dead caveman was found, and they lived only half a mile away from the cave site.

[u/wjbc]

They don't explain the 300 BCE figure and I can't find anything on-line about it. Where did they get it? Who knows?

We know that Mitochondrial Eve is estimated to have lived about 200,000 years ago and Y-chromosomal Adam lived even longer ago, so the most recent common ancestor has to have lived less than 200,000 years ago. But modern homo sapiens are thought to have migrated out of Africa about 70,000 years ago. Any common ancestor born less than 70,000 years ago would have to have a way of spreading genes around the world, which wouldn't be easy.

[u/ConfusedBaguette]

ALABAMA 100

[u/JimC29]

What total BS.

[u/BadKarma89]

Good day for incest lovers, huh?

[u/lennyflank]

It's simple math. With each generation you go back, your number of ancestors doubles. So after just a couple dozen generations, your number of ancestors is larger than the entire world population of the time. Which means that your ancestors were also related to each other--and therefore everyone shares the same ancestors.

[u/De-Hond]

So that's why the incest porn is so popular.

[u/[deleted]]

His name is Voight.