The further back through time we go, the more these lines will coalesce on fewer individuals. Your great-great-great-great-great-grandmother might hold that position in your family tree twice, or many times, as her lines of descent branch out from her, but collapse onto you. You can be, and in fact are, descended from the same individual many times over. What this means is that pedigrees begin to fold in on themselves a few generations back, and become less arboreal, and more a mesh or weblike. If it were, your family tree when Charlemagne was Le Grand Fromage would harbor around 137,438,953,472 individuals on it-more people than were alive then, now, or in total. But this ancestral expansion is not borne back ceaselessly into the past. Each generation back the number of ancestors you have doubles. You have two parents, four grandparents, eight great-grandparents, and so on. We are all special, which also means that none of us is. The following is an excerpt from A Brief History of Everyone Who Ever Lived by Adam Rutherford.
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