We Are All Related Genetically

You know your mum and your dad, and probably you know your grandparents. So literally you have two parents, four grandparents, and 8 great grand parents. If you were to look at your ancestral tree to about 4 generations to you, you have had 30 direct ancestors. If were were to go far back as forty generations to us, then we would be looking at well above a trillion ancestors when we look at 2⁴⁰ parents and these people lived at one point in time together.

Human population has exploded in recent times even more than the stars we have in our milky way and since we have appeared on earth as a specie, we have had about 8000 generations leading to ourselves. If we ask ourselves what happened to our families that are we don't know, is there a possible that you are related to your wife and you do not know. Well, before civilization and the emergence of dating app, we were able to choices of mates based on how far we were able to walk, so there were possibilities that we married our relatives. Even in recent times, people like Albert Einstein and Charles Darwin married their first cousin.

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If we are to look at the maths of how our ancestors married one another, then today, it is no doubt that we share a common ancestor in our family trees which lived within the last 3000 years ago. While there are no fossils or artifact to show this, our genes carry copies of information for years. In the cases were the coding are copied and mutation occurs, the mutations find their way to the next generation and since this mutations slip through, scientist are able to read through our DNAs to be able to tell us our closely or distant related we are to one another.

While we might look different in color, sizes, and looks, we have similar genetic makeup, and this little traces of genetic information helps us understand that at some point we were not many and were living in our gathering. This is why today, humans only differ by about 1 out of 1000 DNA base pairs but because we have a big genome it can reach up to millions of single letter differences (Single Nucleotide Polymorphisms).

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When scientist check our DNA they are able to look for single nucleotide that will be able to identify where we come from as we it will be tested with other genes of thousands or millions of people to identify one's ancestry. Another gene that we possess is the 47th one from our mother found in the mitochondria which is the power house of the cell. All the genes in the mitochondria comes from the mother's egg and not the father's sperm so, it is easier to check ancestry through the unbroken lines of females in your family. With this it has been traced to a woman 150,000 years ago which I will call the Eve mitochondria. I didn't say there were no other female homo sapiens living around then, but we were able to trace it back to her because only her generations exists.

Now that we know that we are related if not closely, I guess the next time you type something on your keyboard to insult someone on X app (formerly Twitter), or Instagram, remember that there is a Single letter nucleotide that joins you both together. The next time you see a person who is stranded, remember that you are helping someone who is related to you genetically regardless of the color, type of hair, eyebrow look and so on.

Read More

_{https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/humans-are-all-more-closely-related-than-we-commonly-think/
https://dnacenter.com/blog/are-all-humans-related-a-deep-dive-into-our-dna/
https://phys.org/news/2013-08-dna-earth.html
https://medlineplus.gov/genetics/understanding/dtcgenetictesting/ancestrytesting/
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC6562384/
https://www.ddbj.nig.ac.jp/ddbj/code-e.html}