Ashkenazic ping!
Sounds like you guys are more "diverse" :-)
Different women will have different numbers of daughters and there's a tendency for some lines to reproduce more prolifically than others. There's a neat little mathematical trick which demonstrates that if you take the total number of women in an isolated group, (say 40), within the same number of generations (40) every female in the group will most likely be descended from just one original female. Using that formula, a group of 160 women could reduce to just 4 lines in 1,000 years. Of course, in the article, it says 40% came from just 4 lines which means there were a lot more than 160 in the original migratory group and there's still plenty of reducing yet to go before you get down to just one line. It's estimated that every woman living today is descended from just one female who lived about 160,000 years ago.
They married descendents of Rachel, Leah, Bilhah, and Zilpah... ;) Just kidding. Good question.
I have a very goy question. Are the Ashkenazim the Hasidim? Or are they something different? I'm just surprised to hear one type of Jew constitute half of the Jewish population. Or is Ashkenazim a bloodline more than a religious practice? And some Ashkenazim are Orthodox, some Conservative, some Reformed, etc.?
Interesting article. Thanks.
>>>Still, it's a little funky how just 4 people left so many descendants. . . . what happened to the other descendants of all the other Jewish women living in Franco-Germany about 1000 years ago?
We don't each descend from one person. We have many ancestors - think your grandparents on both sides, their parents and grandparents, etc. Over 1,000 years there are many opportunities for gene lines to overlap. Given any two people who share the same culture and origins, odds are probably 10-1 that they'll find a common ancestor somewhere up the line.