I was reading an interesting article called "Abraham's math". Don't really know what to think of it but here's a portion from it and you'll get the idea.
The May 2002 issue of the Atlantic Monthly magazine contains an interesting article on genealogy. the writer, Steve Olson, is quite familiar with the procedures involved in tracing one's family tree.
During a visit to Ireland (one of the countries of his ancestry) Olson met a computer scientist and genealogist at Dublin City University named Mark Humphrys. One of the discoveries Hunphrys made in his research was that: "Whenever a reliable family tree was available, almost anyone of Eu8ropean ancestry turned out to be descended from English royalty...even such unlikely people as Hermann Goring and Daniel Boone. Hunprys began to think that such descent was the rule rather than the exception in the Western World, even if relatively few people had the documents to demonstrate it."
It is interesting to note that if one is descended from English royalty, they might also be decended from kin David of Israel, for the royal family has genealogical charts showing their ancestry all the way back to David and further on to Adam.
According to Eliezer Shulman, in his book The Sequence of Events in the Old Testament, Avraham was born in the year 1948 from creation (approximately 2050 BC). His son of promise, "Yitzchak (Isaac), was born one hundred years later in 2048 from creation apprx. 1950 BC. This places the birth of Isaac some 3950 years from the present time. Using 25 years as a generation means that today we are 158 genterations removed from Abraham. Using 40 years per generation, still removes us nearly 100 generations.
The number of ancestors for any single person increases exponentially with each generation (two parents, four grandparents, eight great-grandparents, etc.) Going back only 40 generations yields a potential of over one trillion direct ancestors for a single individual. this number far exceeds the total number of people who have ever lived on the earth since the beginning of time. With such immense numbers involved, it should come as no surprise that we are all more closely related than might have been imagined.
Steve Olson continues in his article: "The idea that virtually anyone with a European ancestor descends from English royalty seems bizarre, but it accords perfectly with some recent research done by Joseph Chang, a statistician at Yale University....
"In a 1999 paper titled 'Recent Common Ancestors of All Present-Day individuals,' Chang showed how to reconcile the potentially huge number of our ancestors with the quantities of people who actually lived in the past...Under the conditions laid out in his paper, the most recent common ancestor of every European today (except for recent immigrants to the Continent) was someone who lived in Europe in the surprisingly recent past---only about 600 years ago. In other words, all Europeans alive today have among their ancestors the same man or woman who lived around 1400.
The mathematical model developed by Chang contains one assumption that can change this seemingly incredible fact. It assumes that every person in Europe, over this six hundred year period, could potentially marry any other person (of the opposite sex) in Europe. According to Olson: "These departures from randomness must push back somewhat the date of Europeans' most recent common ancestor."
However, there has been a great "churning" of peoples of the world over the last several hundred years, as European civilization spread around the world during the Age or Discovery.
"This constant churning of people makes it possible to apply Chang's analysis to the world as a whole. For example almost everyone in the New World must be descended from Enlish royalty---even people of predominantly African or Native American ancestry, because of the long history of intermarriage in the Americas."
Olson's conclusion to the matter is that: "the most common ancestor of all six billion people on earth today probably lived just a couple of thousand years ago."
Abraham lived nearly 4 thousand years ago. Surely if this statistical model is anywherre near correct, every person on earth could conceivably be descended from him, just as the Nivrecu Theory suggests. Equally possible is the theory that every person on earth could be decended from the twelve sons of Jacob, the progenitors of the children of Israel..
So you see ladies and gents, I am my own grandpa afterall. :-)
Hey wait, I thought you were Robby's grandpa. If you are also your own grandpa, then you and Robby must also be either brothers or cousins. I'll leave out the possibility of half- or step- siblings. ;o)
Interesting piece and probably true.
I did a similar thought problem with Jim (I think it was Jim) a while back.
Add in to this what God *promised* Abraham:
Gen 22:17 That in blessing I will bless thee, and in multiplying I will multiply thy seed as the stars of the heaven, and as the sand which [is] upon the sea shore; and thy seed shall possess the gate of his enemies;
And later promised Israel:
Gen 26:3 Sojourn in this land, and I will be with thee, and will bless thee; for unto thee, and unto thy seed, I will give all these countries, and I will perform the oath which I sware unto Abraham thy father;
Gen 26:4 And I will make thy seed to multiply as the stars of heaven, and will give unto thy seed all these countries; and in thy seed shall all the nations of the earth be blessed;
Gen 26:5 Because that Abraham obeyed my voice, and kept my charge, my commandments, my statutes, and my laws.
With God's blessing and the math, I think it's virtually a given that a great number of people in the world today are actual physical descendents of Israel.