Most Of My Ancestors Are Missing !

[satindas]

Hi, I've been researching my family history and managed to get back as early as my 25th Great Grandfather who was born around the year 1050 !
I worked out that everybody has 67,108,864 25th Great Grandparents.
Take this a little further to the 30th GGPs which for me would be back in around the year 900 AD and there would be 1,073,741,824 of them.
According to Wikipedia the total world population was around 310,000,000 in 1000 AD
So ...where did my other 763,741,824 30th Great Grandparents go (or come from) ?

[dr b]

http://www.theanswerbank.co.uk/Society-and-Culture/Question1204020.html

[Mosaic]

You have achieved much more than the vast majority of people researching their family history.
If you are dealing with western europe, only a fraction of the population lived lives that were recorded even in passing. In England this was still the case until the Elizabethan parish registers began in the 1500s.
Your ancestors came from, and went back into, the earth.

[ll_billym]

Your maths is wrong. You are extrapolating the 'wrong way round'. I don't know the exact way to work it out but fundamentally most of your great, great, great, etc. were from the same family, not separate families with separate lines.

[jno]

the further back you go, the more they overlap. One person could be your gggggggggggf a dozen times over through different lines of descent.

[Mr_Messy]

Many of them will have been duplicates!

[pdq1]

If you really want to go back a long way who could have your DNA tested to see if your relatives interbreeded with these:

http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/books/NBK45301/

[wildwood]

If all your human ancestors were completely unrelated you'd still be swinging from the trees.

[Svejk]

I believe we all have more fore-bears than all the people who've ever been born. Interbreeding or overlapping explains the anomaly.
Was there something along the lines of being no more than 6 times removed from anyone we meet? Probably got that mixed up.
Can't be that close to a Borneo head hunter or whatever.

[satindas]

@methyl.
Number of nth GGP's = 2^n
The standard equation for this progression is 2^(n-1) but, as we have 4 x 1st Grand Parents you need to omit the -1.
Not rocket science ;)

[satindas]

@ wildwood. I love to swing in my (family) tree. Its the australopithecine in me ;)