Half of Western European men descended from one Bronze Age ‘king’

Half of Western European men descended from one Bronze Age ‘king’(telegraph.co.uk)

56 points by mjbellantoni 9 years ago | 13 comments

empath75 9 years ago |

This is such a weird article. Literally anybody from 4000 years ago that has any living descendants is going to be a common ancestor of most of the planet. That's just math. Whoever this person was probably wasn't special and probably wasn't a king.

madaxe_again 9 years ago | |

Came here to say the same. It's the same fallacy when people go "did you know there was once only one woman? Mitochondrial dna proves it!".

If anything, the prevalence of one family of haplogroups just underscores a lack of genetic drift, which is what you'd expect from a rapidly growing population due to improvements in technology. The bigger the breeding population the more likely that mutations are drowned out by the prevalent alleles. Isolated populations drift, and mutations propagate more rapidly within them to become universal. If anything, it points to a potential bottleneck 4000 years ago, but not necessarily.

If anyone's got a link to the paper it might shed some light on what was actually described...

iamphilrae 9 years ago | |

Go back far enough and that 'king' was just a fish (or fish type thing)

imron 9 years ago |

Eventually you are either the ancestor of everyone on earth or the ancestor of no-one.

d13 9 years ago | |

I'm confused too. You only need to go back 30 generations until you have 1.07 billion ancestors: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Most_recent_common_ancestor. That means any old bones we dig up that are over about 4,000 years old will almost certainly be one of our relatives. Can anyone the article's significance in this context?

jsnell 9 years ago | | |

If only half the population in Europe shared a most common ancestor 4000 years back, that would be absolutely shocking. But this article is misleading, and that's not what the research says.

It's actually not about ancestry in general, but purely about patrilinear ancestry [0], which doesn't have the same kind of fan-out. If you go 30 generations back, you might have a billion ancestors, but only 30 patrilinear ones.

[0] That's the measurement they have to make. We have technology to measure patrilinear ancestry through the Y chromosome, and matrilinear ancestry through the mitochondrial DNA. But there is no way of doing the same for ancestry in general.

usrusr 9 years ago | | |

If you go back 30 generations, many, if not most, of your ancestors will be ancestors on more than one path. Except when you are a Spanish Habsburg, then going back just three generations might be enough.

mjbellantoni 9 years ago |

There was similar news a few years ago relating how a large percentage of the world is descended from Genghis Khan:

* http://blogs.discovermagazine.com/gnxp/2010/08/1-in-200-men-...

yitchelle 9 years ago |

Coincidentally, I was just reading about how Genghis Khan was supposed to have directly lineage to 1 in 200 of world's male population. That study was in 2010.

http://blogs.discovermagazine.com/gnxp/2010/08/1-in-200-men-...

GunboatDiplomat 9 years ago |

The Indo-European expansions?