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Pre-modern first-birth ages were more in the range 15 to 20. So rather 5 to 6 mothers per century.
Idk, I’m very whelmed by this, warnings weren’t needed, sounds just about right.
If of one person today every previous generation had a unique pair of ancestral parents then go back 80 generations that’s 280 of people had to exist during that 80th generation back. That’s more than 1.2 septillion so a one with 24 zeros. So that’s impossible that’s more people than have existed in history. Meaning that inbreeding has happened in everyone’s family tree. So lots of distant cousin marriages. But unfortunately also some fucked up shit like some of your ancestor’s parents are brother and sister or father and daughter. So if you follow your paternal line back the number of dads is less than the number of mothers.
This is actually a great perspective to point out against anti-intellectual arguments like evolution being fake, when people ask why humans are not evolving. What kind of evolution can you expect in 450 iterations? That’s nothing in the timeline of the earth. Plus 450 mothers is already more than what some religious fanatics claim is the age of the earth.
The greatest difference between us and our distant ancestors isn’t intelligence. It’s the knowledge we’ve inherited. Education is humanity’s greatest achievement.
We all stand on the shoulders of those who came before us. I’m grateful to those who lifted us up, and I’ll humbly do my part to lift those who come after us.
It’s society & available materials.
If you took all your knowledge 10k years ago the daily life would still fairly resemble the lives they had.
That’s a beautiful way of thinking about it!
Anything but metrics…
Haha reminds me of that other stat how you only need to strip/peel a some graphite on a piece of tape like 20 times to reach a single atom thickness (graphene).
I looked up the average age of mothers at the time of their first child birth in 1863 because I really badly wanted to make a joke about a “score” being 20 for that reason.
Sadly the average age was 22-26 so my day is ruined.
I think about this, and do this math in my head too, all the time. 80 mothers to Ancient Rome. 400 mothers to start of farming.
By this math, humans have only been around for about 80,000 mothers.
I’m actually surprised at the reactions.
This is a very, “Yeah…” thing.
Maybe it’s people’s concept of time is centred around the ego. Like, they don’t realise how short 80 years is. That’s only 80 orbits 🤣
Wait until you find out the dinosaurs were basically “yesterday” in Earth’s timeline.
We’re very brief. “Life’s short” isn’t just some quirky saying.
I think it’s the opposite. Most people aren’t that egotistical. We all feel quite small relative to history. But I think OP is highlighting that even history is quite short. Ancient Rome, which feels like a very long time ago, is actually only 80 generations ago. If “life’s short”, then 80 lives is short too.
Gives perspective on how accelerated change has become in modern times.
I pointed out that the people in those photos screaming at Ruby Bridges are still alive and vote like mad and my brother was flabbergasted.
What impressed me more was just how MANY ancestors you would have at that 40 generations back.
Mathematically it’s a lot. Realistically a lot of those ancestors end up being common after 4-6 generations.
And in certain parts of the world a significant portion of those ancestors is Genghis Khan.
You know how the Mormons keep genealogy records for, like, everyone they possibly can? I am American so we may be more mixed than some places but those records went back pretty far and out in a lot of directions geographically. No overlap, lots and lots of people. I mean at some point mathematically it’s more people than the population of the world so you have to be right but they had 20 or more generations in some directions, it was thousands of people on that chart going back hundreds of years, it was crazy.
I also did notice that most of my ancestresses did marry between 25-28, not 14 as Little House on the Prairie had me believing before.
