Part of Everyone's Family Tree

In the July 2, 2006 Sunday edition of the Reading Eagle (p B7) an article by the Associated Press appeared entitled "Researchers close in on ancestor of every living person." The subtitle says "Scholars are amazed to discover that someone who lived as recently as 2,000 years ago is part of everyone's family tree."

Here's another quote from late in the article: "It means when Muslims, Jews or Christians claim to be children of Abraham, they are all bound to be right."

No kidding. I loved this article because it explains the math that proves this to a math simpleton like me, and also explains how these researchers figured it all out with science and math.

This is great news because it proves what we have believed all along. Remember Noah and that flood? Dan Brown in his duh novel, The DaVinci Code repeats the claim that Noah was an albino and that is how albinism is passed through the generations. That can kind of correlate to this information a tiny bit, although I still think of this information as a startling Old Testament urban legend.

How about all those great Biblical stories about Abraham? Could it be true that we are all descended from him? You're darn-tootin'. Genealogists can trace people back for many generations, but unrecorded history becomes a problem, unless your ancestor had some kind of pedigree, royal, criminal (sometimes royal AND criminal), landowner, inventor, conqueror and so on and so forth. This new research seems to take care of that little genealogical quirk.

Our faith is just that, faith. It's nice when science and math bolster our views of our faith. Here's another part of the article:

"It also means that all of us have ancestors of every color and creed. Every Palestinian suicide bomber has Jews in his past. Every Sunni Muslim in Iraq is descended from at least one Shiite. And every Klansman's family has African roots.
How can this be?
It's simple math. Every person has two parents, four grandparents and eight great-grandparents. Keep doubling back through the generations -- 16, 32, 64, 128--and within a few hundred years you have thousands of ancestors.
It's nothing more than exponential growth combined with the facts of life. By the 15th century you've got a million ancestors. By the 13th you've got a billion. Sometime around the 9th century--just 40 generations ago--the number tops a trillion.
But how could anybody--much less everybody--alive today have had a trillion ancestors living during the ninth century?
The answer is, they didn't.
Imagine there was a man living 1,200 years ago whose daughter was your mother's 36th great grandmother, and whose son was your father's 36th great grandfather. That would put him on two branches on your family tree, one on your mother's side and one on your father's."

If you want to read the complete article, check out the Reading Eagle archives or contact me and I'll forward it to you.)

Interesting material....Now you can mathematically prove that a Bible story is real. Now you can honestly say that all men are brothers (okay, sorry about the sexist language, but I'm thinking of a hymn...). Wow.