Human Family Tree

Here’s a really interesting article on the shared genealogy of everyone on the planet. Apparently the roots of the human family tree are relatively shallow.

… everybody on Earth descends from somebody who was around as recently as the reign of Tutankhamen, maybe even during the Golden Age of ancient Greece. There’s even a chance that our last shared ancestor lived at the time of Christ.

“It’s a mathematical certainty that that person existed,” said Steve Olson, whose 2002 book “Mapping Human History” traces the history of the species since its origins in Africa more than 100,000 years ago.

…

With the help of a statistician, a computer scientist and a supercomputer, Olson has calculated just how interconnected the human family tree is. You would have to go back in time only 2,000 to 5,000 years _ and probably on the low side of that range _ to find somebody who could count every person alive today as a descendant.

Furthermore, Olson and his colleagues have found that if you go back a little farther _ about 5,000 to 7,000 years ago _ everybody living today has exactly the same set of ancestors. In other words, every person who was alive at that time is either an ancestor to all 6 billion people living today, or their line died out and they have no remaining descendants.

…

And it wasn’t all that long ago. When you walk through an exhibit of Ancient Egyptian art from the time of the pyramids, everything there was very likely created by one of your ancestors _ every statue, every hieroglyph, every gold necklace. If there is a mummy lying in the center of the room, that person was almost certainly your ancestor, too.

It means when Muslims, Jews or Christians claim to be children of Abraham, they are all bound to be right.

This is something we rarely think about anymore given our liberal bias as autonomous individuals, but if humanity traces back in time to common ancestors, to a common ancestor, does this not infer something crucial about human beings, their origins in relation to a Creator? Any thoughts on mankind? :-)