I have a friend in Paris that on more than one occasion I thought I had seen when there, it was uncanny how much he looked like two other guys, both of which thought I was quite insane.
Bottom line, is that dominant males were able to spread their genes, spread their seed, however you want to describe it, among a large number of females.
Re ; “a handful of Bronze Age forefathers, due to a ‘population explosion’ several thousand years ago”
So how many children do you think a guy could father in a 700-800 year lifespan? Especially with more than one wife?
Charlemagne is in the line of almost all European royalty and, somewhere in that line, almost every descendant had bastard offspring who bred into the general population.
Long story short is a handful of ancestors = nearly all of the population is the rule rather than the exception.
It’s not really all that surprising as the ancient method of fighting wars was to annihilate the losers.
ISIS and the other Moh-ham-madmen still practice war in that manner. One of the reasons there are more Saudi princes than one can shake a stick at is because King Saud after killing so many of his enemies took to himself a harem of wives and concubines and spent the rest of his life acting as if he won the Triple Crown.
Noah and his wife and 3 sons and daughters in law.
See Genesis 10(KJV).
The swastika Nazis were keen on this line of thought also. Substitute “Teutonic forefathers” for “European forefathers.”
I’m going to open up a can of worms...
The original aryans! ;-)
ping!
Interesting, but somewhat less so than the demonstration about 17 years ago that ALL people on Earth are ultimately descended from ONE SINGLE female. Then about 7 years after THAT came the demonstration, also via DNA-linked genetic markers, that ALL people on Earth are ultimately descended from ONE SINGLE male. Needless to say, the team of scientists who discovered this referred to these two as Adam and Eve. So, we really ARE all related, for better or worse. There were NOT several groups of men and women who suddenly transitioned for Apes to homo sapiens, just one.
According to the Bible, King Solomon had seven hundred wives and three hundred concubines.
According to Persian records, King Fat’h Ali Shah Qajar (lived from 1772 to 1834) had 158 wives, all named in the book, Tarikh-e Azodi, and fathered 260 children by those wives.
Warren Steed Jeffs (Fundamentalist Latter Day Saints) married roughly 80 women and had about 250 children before his 2007 arrest.
While Genghis Khan did not marry all of his women, he is believed to have fathered 1,000 to 2,000 children.
And, of course, Wilt Chamberlain claims to have slept with 10,000 women.
It doesn’t take many people like them to squeeze out other male lines.
There is another far more interesting concept at play here.
In Dan Brown’s “Da Vinci Code,” the author build a book around finding a person who was in the blood lineage of Jesus. Finally, one woman was found.
In reality, if you make an assumption, as the movie and book did, that Mary had another child or that Jesus had a child, there is a greater than 50% likelihood that some small genetic remnant of Jesus runs through each of us.
This is determined by multiplying the average number of children, the average number of mothers and the multiplicative effect of approximately 102 generations.
The chances would be less for Asians, and American/South American Indians, Canadian First Nation peoples, Icelanders, etc. and more Middle Easterners of all sects, but would average out to better than 50%.
Hmmmmm
334 men doesn’t seem like a large number to draw conclusions about hundreds of millions of people. Would they have found any more lineages if they had a sample 10 times as large?
334 men doesn’t seem like a large number to draw conclusions about hundreds of millions of people. Would they have found any more lineages if they had a sample 10 times as large?
I read an interesting theory once about the emergence of modern man. Based on a number of genetic studies, it appears that humans went through a genetic bottle neck sometime between 100K-50K years ago. At that point there were perhaps less than a thousand humans alive, and no one knows exactly what brought this about. The article I read suggested that our ancestors were preyed upon nearly to extinction by Neanderthals and other hominids. Then, somehow a series of genetic mutations gave us the ability and social skills to organize in larger groups of fifty or more and develop proto-armies larger than the bands of our competitors, while at the same time heightening our aggressive tendencies. This turned the tables on the Neanderthals and we hunted them to extinction..
“See, infidelity is really GOOD and NECESSARY for the human race PING...” /s
So then, this is all based on some guy's GUESS as to what the populations of parts of Europe were over a 2,000 year span, more than 2,000 years ago.
I’m guessing “low T” wasn’t an issue in the Bronze Age.