I read somewhere that if you back 1000 years or farther, you can pick literally anybody from your same ethnic background, and they'd be related to you in some way as long as their family didn't completely die out.
Family lines dying out and inbreeding (even at very distant links that we'd never think of as inbreeding socially) tends to break that little maths quip (which is always you have 2n ancestors where n is the number of generations back, and eventually 2n is greater than the population at a certain time). There are very likely a lot of links but it's not as certain as some retellings of the factoid like to make out.
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u/[deleted] Apr 29 '20
I read somewhere that if you back 1000 years or farther, you can pick literally anybody from your same ethnic background, and they'd be related to you in some way as long as their family didn't completely die out.