In recent years, I have become a genealogy buff. This is messing with my head real bad. I've looked at the math and it makes sense. The population estimates are correct also based on http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/World_population_estimates So WTF?
going back to 1400 the numbers come out to only a little over twice. as it states in the picture. thats really not all that crazy. keep in mind the idea in the picture is just that.. an idea. in reality over the course of 600 years there is enough cases of ya know this person is younger than that person when they had a kid.. or this person had a kid when they were 15 and this person had a kid when they were 35 etc etc etc so taking all that into account you can see how it works out. the picture assumes too much.
notice it follows a binary pattern...2, 4, 8, 16, 32, 64, 128, 256, 512.....then comes 1024, 2048, etc.....
Well it is pretty interesting . The other factors are some gene pools become dominant thru better survival and family size, whilst others may be poor survivors/ killed off or fail to reproduce. So the notion is not far fetched at all.
i'm interested in learning about my family history, do you know any good resources to get started? all the online services seem to require payment, i'm willing to do my own digging, im just not sure where to begin. to be fair, i've not really tried yet, it was just an idle sort of fancy.
I got even further back than that, somewhere in the 1600s. But that was only one of the possible hundreds of thousands of family lines. Pretty depressing if you think of it.
