Ahh, but without a purpose, how can one tell what the question actually is?
You could be asking about who you get by tracing back births and matings over the last 300,000 years that led to you. But do you then count people more than once if they show up more than once in this back trace?
Or are you really asking where your genetic material came from? It’s quite possible that none of your genetic material came from one of your great-great-great-great-great-great-great-grandfathers. Genes aren’t selected independently to be included or not in sperm or egg, but instead come in larger chunks (I think a few hundred of them), which means that it’s entirely possible for the entire genetic contribution of one “ancestor” to by chance be lost in relatively few generations (of course, that means that some other ancestor contributes more than one might have thought). If you define “ancestor” as “person some of whose genes I have”, then the number of distant ancestors you have is much less than you might have thought.
In the above, I’m tracing back where from a physical point of view the genes came from. But of course, the fact that the genes of some ancestor did not by a physical process result in any genes in you does not imply that you don’t have some of the exact same genes as them—which you may have obtained from some other ancestor. Does that count?
In that case, it’s non-farmers by a good margin. Our ancestry goes back well over a billion years, mostly in species with short generation times. Farming goes back roughly ten thousand years in a single species with a ~25 year generation time.
Ahh, but without a purpose, how can one tell what the question actually is?
You could be asking about who you get by tracing back births and matings over the last 300,000 years that led to you. But do you then count people more than once if they show up more than once in this back trace?
Or are you really asking where your genetic material came from? It’s quite possible that none of your genetic material came from one of your great-great-great-great-great-great-great-grandfathers. Genes aren’t selected independently to be included or not in sperm or egg, but instead come in larger chunks (I think a few hundred of them), which means that it’s entirely possible for the entire genetic contribution of one “ancestor” to by chance be lost in relatively few generations (of course, that means that some other ancestor contributes more than one might have thought). If you define “ancestor” as “person some of whose genes I have”, then the number of distant ancestors you have is much less than you might have thought.
In the above, I’m tracing back where from a physical point of view the genes came from. But of course, the fact that the genes of some ancestor did not by a physical process result in any genes in you does not imply that you don’t have some of the exact same genes as them—which you may have obtained from some other ancestor. Does that count?
Not every question has to have a purpose! :) Imagine that this is intellectual interest only, at least to me.
No? This question would be trivially easy if you did lol.
No. I personally wanted a literal answer to my literal question.
In that case, it’s non-farmers by a good margin. Our ancestry goes back well over a billion years, mostly in species with short generation times. Farming goes back roughly ten thousand years in a single species with a ~25 year generation time.
The question specified the restriction to humans in the last 300,000 years.
I’m confused about the disagree votes. Which specific sentence do you disagree with?
Note you can now line-item react to highlight specific disagreement!
Very cool!