proto-proto-proto...

[Victor Steinbok]

The paper essentially says, as far as I can tell without reading it in
its entirety, that different European groups have non-trivial genetic
relationships pointing to nearly any two people from Europe having some
ancestor in common as recently as 1000 years ago (obviously, some people
would have ancestors in common a lot closer than that, e.g., if they are
cousins, but that's not the point--the point is that people who come
from different nationalities and would not consider themselves in any
way related are actually related in fairly recent history). The
reporters then turned it into "all Europeans have a common ancestor from
1000 years ago", which I would consider to be rather obvious tripe. But
if you think I'm being unclear just read the reports for yourself and
compare them to the original paper (I did post that link and citation
earlier).

     VS-)


On 5/8/2013 5:17 PM, Dan Goncharoff wrote:
> I don't understand this at all.
>
> Is someone saying that the 45 million people in Europe in 1000 are NOT
> 'common ancestors' of the 740 million in Europe now, or that they are,
> which would seem pretty unexceptional to me?
>
> DanG

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