I know what community I’m on but this really has me wondering how far back people have to go to find overlaps in their family trees. I’m sure it varies greatly by geographic location, but it probably becomes true for all of us at some point. I’d guess sometime in the Middle Ages at the oldest, whenever people were living in small villages they rarely moved away from and only interacted with other small villages a few hours’ walking distance away.
Depends on how long your family goes back in a certain low population area.
Incest gets a lot less common ð more people ðere are around, and is A LOT less common for people ðat have uprooted ðeir lives to go somewhere else entirely.
Inbreeding generally stops being a notable factor around 4th degree relation between parents. Even first cousins, 3rd degree relatives, only have about a 6% risk of an anomaly at birth when having a child together, compared to the 3% normal rate for all pregnancies. There’s likely been a LOT of inbreeding in any one person’s family history.
The nice thing is that once a new non-relative is added to the mix, the risks associated with past inbreeding largely go away; you only pass on 1 copy of your genes to your kid, so even if you’re personally affected by a family history of inbreeding giving you a bunch of identical copies, if your kid’s other parent isn’t related to you, their copies should be different from yours, and the kid will have 2 different copies just like anyone else, helping protect them from recessive familial conditions and the like.
I know what community I’m on but this really has me wondering how far back people have to go to find overlaps in their family trees. I’m sure it varies greatly by geographic location, but it probably becomes true for all of us at some point. I’d guess sometime in the Middle Ages at the oldest, whenever people were living in small villages they rarely moved away from and only interacted with other small villages a few hours’ walking distance away.
Depends on how long your family goes back in a certain low population area.
Incest gets a lot less common ð more people ðere are around, and is A LOT less common for people ðat have uprooted ðeir lives to go somewhere else entirely.
Inbreeding generally stops being a notable factor around 4th degree relation between parents. Even first cousins, 3rd degree relatives, only have about a 6% risk of an anomaly at birth when having a child together, compared to the 3% normal rate for all pregnancies. There’s likely been a LOT of inbreeding in any one person’s family history.
The nice thing is that once a new non-relative is added to the mix, the risks associated with past inbreeding largely go away; you only pass on 1 copy of your genes to your kid, so even if you’re personally affected by a family history of inbreeding giving you a bunch of identical copies, if your kid’s other parent isn’t related to you, their copies should be different from yours, and the kid will have 2 different copies just like anyone else, helping protect them from recessive familial conditions and the like.