Submitted by vesuvisian t3_zwg75b in askscience
thephoton t1_j20ak83 wrote
Reply to comment by Octavus in What is the ‘widest’ ancestral generation? by vesuvisian
> At some point 7,300 to 5,300 years ago if someone had a living descendant, then all of humanity is their descendant.
Weren't, for example, Native Americans, isolated from Europe for more than 7,300 years?
So if you consider someone living in the Andes with pure Native American ancestry, how are they descended from Cheddar Man?
Octavus t1_j20c6b6 wrote
There isn't believed to be anyone left in the Americas or Tasmania who does not have any European ancestry from the last 500 years.
Going the other direction Paleo Eskimo bridged the gap for a while between the Americas and Asia. Their culture spanned from Russia through Alaska into Greenland.
There was a continuous but some gene flow between Australia and South East Asia. Any other isolated groups of humans have only been isolated for a few hundred years.
thephoton t1_j24ijax wrote
> There isn't believed to be anyone left in the Americas or Tasmania who does not have any European ancestry from the last 500 years.
OK, but take the Andean's great-to-the-nth grandmother from 7300 years ago (one of the ones who lived in the same region all those centuries ago). Is that grandmother also an ancestor of the teacher in Somerset? And of some villager in a remote village in Tibet?
Octavus t1_j24z5w5 wrote
Their ancestry would spread to Alaska present day Alaska on only a few hundred years. Paleo Eskimo, who lives from Russia through Alaska into Greenland. They acted as the bridge between the old and new worlds 4,500 and 1,500 years ago.
The world has been much more interconnected than what most would believe. It takes only one person after complete mixing to spread an entire continent of ancestry. Do not underestimate just how much mixing occurs in 1,000 years, that is enough time to completely mix all of Europe.
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