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Solving the Great Generational Paradox

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Grant

14 horas atrás

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Here's a set of genealogy questions that have been bugging me since they occurred to me several years ago. Let's see if anyone else has considered this seeming paradox and can suggest some answers. I've posted this question on other genealogy boards, talked to people in person about this, and searched the web for answers, to no avail. Consider the following... Since every one of us have two parents, no more, no fewer, each of our generations by definition exactly doubles in size with each step back we take. In other words, it took two people, your parents, to make you. It took four people, your grand parents, to make your parents. It took eight people, your great grandparents, to make your grand parents. Etc. Ok so far? Now it begins to get tricky. If you keep working those numbers backwards, they quickly become mind-boggling. For example, at thirty generations back from you, it took over one billion people just at that thirtieth generational level to have resulted in you. And since every one of those people had to have two parents, it keeps going on doubling for each generation. There are over two billion people in your thirty-first generation, four billion people in your thirty-second generation, eight billion people in your thirty-third generation, and so on. Here's one of the problems - as your (our) generations keep doubling at every level, the population of Earth gets smaller. For example, if we use twenty years as an average for each generation, thirty generations was six hundred years ago. Were there a billion people alive on Earth six hundred years ago? Two billion people alive six hundred and twenty years ago? Four billion people on Earth six hundred and forty years ago? If you figure in a range for generations to have been alive it helps with the numbers a bit, but not much. For example, if you average only fifteen years per generation, then thirty generations covers four hundred years, and if you use forty years per generation, then that covers twelve hundred years. So your billion ancestors in generation thirty could have lived anywhere over a span of eight hundred years, which helps with the equation somewhat, but doesn't seem to completely answer it. It really only puts off the inevitable, meaning at some point, you have more ancestors at a given level than there would have been people alive on Earth at that time or during the given span of time, and that assumes everyone who was alive during that given time frame was your ancestor, which of course couldn't be true since many people have no offspring (thus becoming genealogical dead ends). At generation forty, which at twenty years average per generation was only eight hundred years ago, we have over a trillion ancestors just at that level. Even using the fifteen to forty year range for generations, adding together everyone who lived on Earth during that several century window, the numbers seem nearly impossible. That's only roughly a thousand years ago, nowhere near Biblical or genetic Adam and Eve. The simple fact is each of our family pyramids keeps getting bigger by a factor of two as we go back in time generation by generation, but the population of Earth gets smaller, dramatically so prior to only about two hundred years ago. It also makes no sense when you consider that you can pick anyone who ever lived, even it was say, someone eight thousand years ago in Mesopotamia, and the same thing would hold true for them. It's simple mathematics. Forty generations before them were a trillion ancestors. Another problem is that no matter whether you believe in the Biblical Adam and Eve or the genetic versions, at some point we all sprang from the same two or small group of people somewhere in the Middle East or Africa. So how does a generational pyramid that doubles each step back you take, at a trillion people and growing at only the fortieth generation level, suddenly reverse itself and narrow down to only two or a group of people tens of thousands of years before that? Were there people with no parents? Doesn't everyone have to have two parents, no more, no fewer, thus doubling each generation before them? It doesn't make sense to me. I am open to suggestions as to how these seeming paradoxes can be reconciled. Feel free to sit down and work it out on paper, but be forewarned - you'll end up with a headache (I speak from experience :-)).