Would it be relatively easy to calculate the number of Great, Great, GReat etc. grandparents back to the year one AD? Just curious to see myself at the bottom of this giant pyramid. I am not sure that this is correct, but several years ago I figured out ten generations would yield 2050. If you allow 60 years to be one generation than that would cover 600 years. Can anyone help?
A more accurate number for a generation would be about 30, maybe even less. Very few people are born when their parents are 60.
Zev Steinhardt
rough calculation:
30 years per generation.
2000 years until 1 AD.
2000/30 = approx. 67 generations
I would think that since people seem to gradually live longer and longer - and reproducing later - as history rolls on, the further back in time you go, the number of years that best represent a generation would gradually shrink. This would raise the # of “greats” far above 67.
It’s a tough thing to qualify when it’s theoretically possible to be a grandparent at the age of 26 or even less.
This easily works out to 2 to the 67th power. This is a very large number,exceeding the number of humans who ever lived. Even cutting it by a third to account for local concentration. Guess what… - We are all related.
Cecil has already answered the question about how we can have more great[sup]n[/sup]-grandparents than there were people on earth 1000 years ago here.
I do a little bit of genealogy. I can go back one family line 12 generations to the late 1600s, and another 10 generations to the early 1700s, which works out to between 25 and 30 years per generation. Also, so lines have larger spreads than others. I even have some people who show up in more than one family line at different number of generations back, so it can get very complicated.