• Title of article

    Inbreeding, pedigree size, and the most recent common ancestor of humanity

  • Author/Authors

    Lachance، نويسنده , , Joseph، نويسنده ,

  • Issue Information
    روزنامه با شماره پیاپی سال 2009
  • Pages
    10
  • From page
    238
  • To page
    247
  • Abstract
    How many generations ago did the common ancestor of all present-day individuals live, and how does inbreeding affect this estimate? The number of ancestors within family trees determines the timing of the most recent common ancestor of humanity. However, mating is often non-random and inbreeding is ubiquitous in natural populations. Rates of pedigree growth are found for multiple types of inbreeding. This data is then combined with models of global population structure to estimate biparental coalescence times. When pedigrees for regular systems of mating are constructed, the growth rates of inbred populations contain Fibonacci n-step constants. The timing of the most recent common ancestor depends on global population structure, the mean rate of pedigree growth, mean fitness, and current population size. Inbreeding reduces the number of ancestors in a pedigree, pushing back global common ancestry times. These results are consistent with the remarkable findings of previous studies: all humanity shares common ancestry in the recent past.
  • Keywords
    Biparental coalescence , genealogy , INBREEDING , MRCA , Theory
  • Journal title
    Journal of Theoretical Biology
  • Serial Year
    2009
  • Journal title
    Journal of Theoretical Biology
  • Record number

    1539904