Only 12,000 Generations
Just some thoughts about our past
Not sure exactly what got me thinking about this topic, but I had the sudden interest about thinking about mankind's past. Apparently modern humans have "popped up" around 300,000 years ago.
The first modern humans, Homo sapiens, emerged around 300,000 years ago, based on fossil evidence from sites like Jebel Irhoud in Morocco. This date is supported by skeletal remains with modern human traits, such as a high forehead and small brow ridges, distinct from earlier hominins like Homo erectus. (Grok)
That's a really long time for us to comprehend. In fact, it's difficult to really grasp it with 10,000 years ago being around when our earliest megalithic sites like Göbekli Tepe were built. Now multiply that by 30...
However, when we look at the number of generations it took from all the way back then to present time it is only around 12,000. That is assuming an average of around 25 years per generation. So, if you go back to every e.g. father in your family tree there would have been only 12,000 fathers when counting one per generation. I tried to generate 12k so it is more graspable and GEN AI completely fails at this. In fact it is outright stupid. This is like the 5th image I tried to create and Grok gave up and simply stated that this is 12k bricks in total. Great...
Google Gemini did a better job (after 5 prompts) and if we assume that the depth of the stacks is a bit longer than the width this is actually 12k bricks in total.
If we try to realize this number in terms of people standing shoulder to shoulder we get something like this:
Not very much imo. To me this just shows how short our direct line of lineage is (again, only when we take one ancestor per generation). We can fit them all in a relatively small space.
By comparison, 12k generations for fruit flies would take only around 400 years! That is only 0.13% of the time. We'd only have around 16 generations of humans in that period.
But how many individuals would that include?
If we count all individuals as being unique ancestors we would get a number so large that it would far exceed the number of all atoms in the universe!
Each generation doubles the number of ancestors: 2 parents (generation 1), 4 grandparents (generation 2), etc.
So around 4.573 x 10^3612
In scientific notation that might look small, but it is essentially a number starting with 4.573 followed by 3,612 digits
So... 4,5730000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000...
Obviously that is just theoretically speaking. Practically, humans are all related. It becomes quite an interesting thought to actually realize this. We are all related... just go back a couple of thousand generations and we essentially arrive at a same relative (this is probably much much shorter on average). Grok has this to say:
For 12,000 generations (300,000 years, back to the emergence of modern humans), your unique ancestors include:
Recent unique lineages (last few hundred generations).
Shared ancient ancestors common to all humanity.
The actual number is bounded by historical population sizes and the total humans who ever lived, estimated at 105–117 billion (with 117 billion as a recent figure). This serves as an upper limit, as not every human who ever lived is in your direct ancestry (some lines died out without descendants). However, due to extensive relatedness and the IAP, your ancestry tree encompasses a vast portion of humanity's history, making the unique count on the order of tens to hundreds of billions—far smaller than the theoretical figure but still immense.
So everybody has around tens to hundreds of billions in their ancestry tree (essentially the total number of all humans that ever lived minus a couple of percentages I guess).
I asked AI how large a crowd of that size would be (a hundred billion people). And it said something like 17% of the world's surface. Africa is around 20%, so imagine people standing shoulder to shoulder together and filling almost all of Africa.
Of course GEN AI failed miserably at creating a world map and only highlighting Africa. Seems like the models still have a far way to go...
A bit better, but I had to manually upload a world map...
Conclusion
So what? I guess I was just a bit curious about some numbers. I find it interesting that the number of generations of modern humans seems so small but our ancestry tree is gigantic. Perhaps the take away message here is that in a sense we are still a young species (imagine the generations of fruit flies going back 300,000 years...). We are also all relatives. It's strange that humans so easily forget that. Just think of your cousins. Are they all close to you? I imagine most would say they are not. Yet you share a high percentage of your genes with them. The world would surely be a different place if we felt that bond more clearly.
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Humanity is 5 epochs old. We have been around the Mayan Calendar 5 times.
Noah's flood was the end of the last epoch before this one that just ended in 2012.
Archeological dating sucks. Their number have been show to be way off. And it doesn't help that we are probably only about 1000-1250 AD, because people messed with the calendar.
We also do not take into account that there were much more advanced civilizations of humans on the planet. We have reset 4 times.
no doubt our past is quite different to the official story. We simply know too little to be very confident about it.
The real elegance of the universe and the biological processes that fuel life on Earth is that all that mater that makes up our ancestors is recycled again and again.
Each and every part of my body may have made up the body of a former human being at some point. The carbon atom, the calcium in my bones, the iron in my blood.
It is a fascinating topic to ponder on.
that's a really good point as well. Shows the interconnectedness of it all...
I wrote a story about that a little while ago, it is one of my favourite pieces of writing I've ever done.
Only if you believe what we have been told about human existence. I have my doubts! Cool thinking you've done here though.
That map is pretty funny.
I used to... but pretty sure it's more cyclical. What are your beliefs when it comes to our origins?
I used to blindly believe what I was taught about the big bang, evolution, the whole nine yards, but now I find all that too phantasmagorical. Same with genetics - what kind of nonsense is all that?! Too much of medicine is based on genetics now, and I don't see us getting any healthier because of it. Every other person has or has had cancer. Every other person has GI issues. The rest of us suffer from headaches, arthritis, or depression. The problems I see with the dictates of our medical "science", so blindly trusted by most of us, has me questioning everything I have ever been told regarding science. It is all theoretical.
I don't know what to believe, or even if what our origins are matters one whit. That we are all living in a giant video game is as plausible as the big bang. Maybe the big bang is when the game first started, some entity decided it needed something to entertain itself, so it created us.
I need coffee.
Wow, the second image of the 12K bricks looks very realistic enough to mistaken for a real image at a glance. Look at the shadow of the guy on the bricks!
I think migration contributed a lot in creating the perceived differences we seem to have despite we all being the same at the root level. As a young species, we have so much to learn or catch up on compared to the amount of time the Earth has existed.