The Ancestor Paradox

25/12/2025 4 min
The Ancestor Paradox

Listen "The Ancestor Paradox"

Episode Synopsis

To learn more about this topic, start your googling with these keywords:


Genealogy: a line of descent traced continuously from an ancestor.

Genetic ancestor: a person from whom an individual is biologically descended

Genetic ancestry: the genetic origin of a person's population, and the specific lines of descent through which they inherited DNA from their ancestors.

Pedigree: the recorded ancestry, especially upper-class ancestry, of a person or family.

Pedigree collapse: a term used in genealogy to describe when the number of distinct ancestors in a family tree is smaller than it would be otherwise.


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