re: #274 FemNaziBitch

And those few percent add up to mean that “nearly all people” in assumed descents.

Think about this: some of my royal pedigree goes back to good ol’ Ansegisel. Think of the number of generations between then and now.

Let’s say there are 40 generations between him and me (just as a nice round figure - I’ve not actually counted them.)

Assume each generation has, on average, 4 offspring (by marriage) that live to an old enough age to reproduce (though often it was more, sometimes it was less.)

Without pedigree collapse downstream, that makes 4³⁹ descendants! Now that is an impossibly large number of people to live in Europe, so we know there is significant collapse of the pedigree.

Anyway, let’s say there is 10% chance of an NPE per generation that lives to reproduce themselves. If there are N “legitimate” descendants, the genetic total becomes 1.1N .

So, to calculate the ratio of the number of total, versus pedigreed, descendants after G generations is simply 1.1^G.

Plug in say 39 for G and you get approximately 41. That means after 39 generations the original parent has 41 times more descendants than what the pedigree would suggest!