Sally;
We have been reading with interest. Now many on our lists are genealogists.
You were writing on tribes and genealogy.
Here is an exercise to illustrate just how mathematically complex we are as
descendants. We each have 2 parents. We each have 4 grandparents. We have 8
great grandparents, we have 16 great great grandparents, and the previous
generation to that has 32 with a certainty unless there was intermarriages
of and within the generations. You can guess where this leads, 6 generations
back there were 64 ancestors, and seven generations back there were 128.
Keep going and one has to sit down in amazement because of direct ancestors
one will be able to point to how many say 15 generations ago? ( No prize for
this however because this is grade 4 math!) If we speculate that a
generation is for arguments sake 40 years we are still just back to Prince
Henry's time in 15 generations.
Now this is not brain science, rather simple biology and applied
mathematics, or genealogical charting. When one speaks of being descendants
of a person or a race or a geography the possibilities are well extremely
vast that a particular individual is descended from a tribe, race, or
geography. The human race is genetically intermixed far beyond our
realization or appreciation.
Enjoy Sally and and keep writing, I enjoy reading.
Neil Sinclair
Toronto/PEI/Argyll
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