Obama the slave owner

[jman220]

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Also, there is no human being on earth who is greater than 50th cousins from any other human being on earth. So when you think about it, who you were related to from 200 years ago is really pretty irrelevant.

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Really? 50th cousins (assume a generous 25 years per generation) gets you back about 1275 years. It seems likely that a descendant of some remote African tribe and a Chinese fishing village won't have a common ancestor as early as 725 A.D.

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What I read (and its probably discussed in the book I cited above), is that there has been so much migration of people's and intermarriage throughout human history that someone from a Chinese fishing village and an African Bush-Man, or an Australian aborigine, or an eskimo, are indeed, at most, 50th cousins. What this also means is that most of us are much much closer than 50th cousins. Just think of all the nomadic people's out there, realize that people have a lot of sex with strangers, and it makes more sense. Its kind of like the Kevin Bacon degrees of separation thing. The Chinese Fisherman doesn't have to have direct contact with the African Tribe, they just have to have had contact with someone who had contact with someone who had contact with someone who had contact with someone who had contact with the African tribe, 50 times over. Since most people in small local villages are all inter-related anyway by no more than fourth or fifth cousins, all it would take is one person in the village inter-marrying with someone else in the chain for the whole thing to work.

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You don't become cousins with someone by marriage.

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No, you don't, but the next generation does. Which is what the works I've cited state.