830
Generations
(lemmy.nz)
"Warning: mothers being used as a unit of measurement ahead"
Even crazier if you think in human lifetimes. Taking the global life expectancy of 72 years, the beginning of our era was 28 lifetimes ago.
Middle Ages ended 8 lifetimes ago.
Hey what the fuck I wasn't ready
Similarly: we all come from an unbroken line of people who had children.
It may be that throughout history not having kids is common. Gay people who never had children may have been common. Ugly, poor or unpleasant people who never managed to find a partner may have been common. Asexual people may have been common.
Straight people who had sex but never had kids were probably not common, just because good contraception wasn't available.
Still, if you're a person who, for whatever reason, is not going to have kids, none of your direct ancestors can understand that life.
Similarly: we all come from an unbroken line of people who had children.
indeed we come from an unbroken line of animals who had offspring. you can hop back one generation at a time til you get to our early ape ancestors, then those shrew-like things, reptiles, fish, then single cell organisms, in the end you'll reach the very first cell to ever exist, one single cell from which every living thing evolved.
Unless there was some simultaneous evolution. The first cell-like thing probably evolved from something almost cell-like before that. If conditions were right for that cell-like thing to happen, it might have happened more than once, so you might have multiple ancestors that were all among the first cells.
Not just people, it goes back all the way to the origin of life, whether that happened here or elsewhere and life just somehow ended up migrating here.
There's an unbroken hereditary line between each of us and cells that first tried to eat mitochondria and instead of breaking them down into one meal's worth of energy and nutrients, they ended up forming a symbiotic relationship, giving our ancestors (and us) the ability to take more energy from the oxygen that was slowly filling the atmosphere than it was causing damage and surviving the earliest known mass extinction as well as snowball earth.
Then our lineage was able to survive the Cambrian explosion, I'm guessing that's than brains evolved and suddenly life could control a wide variety of different shapes and body types and it did before settling in to the more common body types that survived to this day.
We survived countless mass extinctions, including all of the major ones, like massive asteroid impacts that rained molten glass all over the globe just from the rebound and made today's global warming seem quaint. Each of our ancestors was able to survive to the age of reproduction without getting eaten by the giant insects of the Carboniferous (though we were still in the water so kinda lucked out), we survived the early oceans/seas, the emergence of amphibians and reptiles. We survived the dinosaurs, probably as tiny nocturnal rodents. We survived past that when birds and mammals diversified after the dinosaurs were gone.
We survived when primates started changing the very nature of the game of survival, despite several other species getting a head start on populating the globe. For better or worse, we took the planet from Neanderthals, homo erectus, the Denisovans, the hobbit-like hominids, and any others that left Africa before us (not to mention dominated the competition inside Africa).
Only at that point did we start surviving the brutal history of our species and all the wars, famines, plagues, natural disasters, building collapses, personal disagreements that could have turned violent, religions, brutal rulers, collapses of civilization, and emergence of the next set of bandit or war lords.
Also billions of years of single-celled competition prior to that mitochondria symbiosis event.
My bloodline ends with me, and everything ive ever done has culminated in this exact moment (at time of writing)
A bloodline ending is also probably incredibly common. But, not once in our direct ancestors has a bloodline ever ended.
That's actually one of the things that got me thinking about this. My family has a tradition that the first born son always gets a certain first name. My dad's the third-born male, so he didn't get the name, and didn't pass it down to me. But, his oldest brother did, so it's my cousin's name.
My cousin's probably not going to have kids. Or, if he does, they'd be happy little accidents who aren't part of the family and don't get the first-born-son name. So that name and that tradition dies with him. It's a bit unfortunate because over time that first name has become less common and I like the name. So, for the first time in centuries(?) there won't be someone with that name.
I thought about it a bit, and realized, it's probably actually fairly common. When you're the end of a chain like that, you might feel pressured because everybody before you had carried on the tradition and passed on the name. However, that has to be the case, because if your father or grandfather had failed to pass on the name, you wouldn't be around to see it.
There are probably "bloodlines" ending all the time. But if you're part of a "bloodline", it probably feels like a big deal because everybody until you has ensured it survived.
(Having said that, "bloodlines" are a dumb concept, since each parent provides about 50% of the DNA. So, even if you're a "Trey" and share the same name with your dad and grandfather, you only share half your DNA with your dad and a quarter with your grandfather. In a sense, you could say that the strength of every bloodline is cut in half with every generation. That is, unless you're breeding with blood relatives, and then the bloodline may be strong, but the genetic disorders are even stronger.)
First law of socio-genetics: Celibacy is not hereditary
From some book of Murphy's laws I found at home as a kid and fell in love with
Not necessarily accurate, though.
See selfish genes (ideally from someone other than Dawkins), and gay uncle hypothesis.
I don't know what a selfish gene is and I cba to read a textbook right now, but IF you really want to take this seriously, a recessive gene is enough to make the statement untrue.
I do however suspect that this joke law was meant as a joke.
tldr: natural selection doesn’t select for fit individuals, it selects for genes, and at the population level. Plenty of species have strong drives in individuals that will destroy their individual fitness, like bees and ants, but those genes survive just fine.
Also the unfortunate truth of rape. Rapists aren't exactly picky
As an American, this is American math. "Thats 4 school buses" "those are 9 football fields!" "Thats the weight of 35 fully grown hippos!"
Like, its not THAT unbelievable. A lot can happen in a human lifetime.
But it's not a human lifetime, it's a generation....or 25 years in this case.
As a 27 year old... Same thing
You just hold on to that thought, for as long as you can :)
Idk, they had kids a lot earlier than 25 for the vast, vast majority of world history.
Maybe their first kid, but a lot of families (i come from catholics) had a lot of kids
My parents are/were 90. I started telling them they've been alive for more than a third of the history of the United States. They loved hearing that shit.
The greatest difference between us and our distant ancestors isn't intelligence. It's the knowledge we've inherited. Education is humanity's greatest achievement.
We all stand on the shoulders of those who came before us. I'm grateful to those who lifted us up, and I'll humbly do my part to lift those who come after us.
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This is actually a great perspective to point out against anti-intellectual arguments like evolution being fake, when people ask why humans are not evolving. What kind of evolution can you expect in 450 iterations? That's nothing in the timeline of the earth. Plus 450 mothers is already more than what some religious fanatics claim is the age of the earth.
Actually, this math is almost exactly how the young earth creationist cult came to their number for the age of the earth. The counted out all the begats in the Bible from Adam to Jesus and multiplied by an average amount of time between births.
What kind of evolution can you expect in 450 iterations?
Actually quite a lot. The pace of evolutionary change is a function of the amount of variation present in a population and the intensity of selection (i.e. the death rate). There was one study done of the variation of bone dimensions present in modern populations of chimpanzees that suggests that the transition from chimpanzee-style locomotion to full bipedality (at least the variant of bipedality observed in Ardipithecus (~5 million years ago) could have happened on the scale of a few thousand years.
This is not to say that it did happen that fast, just that it could have given a strong enough intensity of selection. There is a weird tendency in paleoanthropology for researchers to propose something that might have happened and it becomes accepted by the general public as something that did happen.
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Idk, I'm very whelmed by this, warnings weren't needed, sounds just about right.
That's not to say that some of these cities weren't huge though. Rome had ~750K at it's peak. Some places in China had 1 million. We just have a lot more huge cities now.
https://www.worldatlas.com/ancient-world/the-largest-ancient-cities-ever-built.html
Huge for that time, sure... But we've had concerts with more people than in those huge cities.
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The average mother having their average daughter at an average of 25 is historically probably quite an overestimate. 20 would be a much safer guess, but there's a good chance it's lower than that too.
Doesn't change the math that much though, easily less than a thousand generations since the advent of agriculture either way.
Surprisingly no. At least in central and western Europe, child marriages were very much a nobility thing. Securing alliances and such. And even for those the first child may well have been much later.
I don’t have an individual statistic on hand but https://fakehistoryhunter.net/2026/01/18/age-of-marriage-giving-birth-in-medieval-europe/ has collected a bunch of sources that suggest that the usual age of first marriage in medieval Europe for women was around their mid 20s, pretty much the same as today.
I'm not talking about child marriage. Traditionally women were considered to be of marrying age at around 15 or 16 (note that this doesn't mean they got married at exactly this age -- it means the lower bound). The blog you link seems to be intentionally or unintentionally conflating child marriage (prepubescent girls) with marrying between 15 and 20. And indeed the sources it cites seem to largely support an average marrying age of around 20 for women until the 17th century.
This is also of course only for the medieval period, which is relatively recent all things considered. That still leaves 8500 years unaccounted for until the advent of agriculture, and during those 8500 years it's far more likely for women to have given birth to their first child younger rather than older than in the medieval period.
Although interestingly we have to take into account how many children were born per woman and until what age. Then we have to consider how many survived.
This would push the average age above that of the average age of first childbirth. The child must survive to eventually descend to you. I don't think it makes the age 25, but likely higher than 15
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Pre-modern first-birth ages were more in the range 15 to 20. So rather 5 to 6 mothers per century.
You're assuming that your matrilineal line is entirely composed of firstborns.
I'm not who you were responding to, but first borns certainly aren't necessary. High fertility, low marriage age places like West Africa (Niger in particular has an average of 7 births per woman) meet the 15-20 range pretty spot on. A woman can easily have a child every year or so from 15 to 20, then they sort of coast to a stop by their late 20s. The majority of births are early because their so close together.
Average reported marriage age of women in Niger is 19... I've lived there, and in the village, it's 15 or 16. I have seen 9 year olds get "married" but it was really more like a reservation to get real married when she's 15 or so. Even using official stats, 1 kid before 20 and 3 or 4 kids before age 25 is very achievable.
I have personally met 30-year old grandmothers there who didn't think anything of it. They're 75% of the way to average life expectancy anyways.
I would say an average of 5 mothers per century up to 1850 or 1900 sounds about right, and is still a fairly conservative figure.
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Anything but metrics…
The advent of agriculture (11.5 kya) was 4.5 hectomothers ago
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this post was submitted on 23 Oct 2026
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