I mean, can you really say for all practical purposes you're related if Joe Bob is both of your great great great great uncles? After so many generations it ceases to be relevant.
More than second cousins and it's pretty irrelevant anyway. If they're the same ethnicity as you there's a good chance you're some sort of cousins anyway. (Well humanity had a common ancestor so EVERYONE is kinda your cousin, eh)
Well, still technically your cousin, but also close family tie, moving them beyond cousin status. Like everybody is a quadrilateral, so you are fucking another quadrilateral, but it gets weird when rectangles or squares start fucking the same shapes when their family tree is all just rectangles or squares.
My wife is literally from the other side of the world... So now you have me wondering who our last common ancestor could be and how many degrees removed we are.
My wife and I both have Scottish ancestry. Turns out there’s a chance a clan I descended from may have nearly genocided a clan she descended from, and if they had completed the job back in the day there’s a good chance she wouldn’t have been born. A few from her clan were let go to spread the word to others to not fuck around, and she’s descended from one of them.
Lol, that actually sounds like fun to investigate, and i'm a bit jealous. My SO and I both have family that lived in rural Arkansas up until the early-to-mid 1900s. We stopped asking questions after we discovered that because we don't want to end up having to ask how close is too close. We're definitely not 2nd cousins or anything, and it's doubtful that our respective "rural Arkansas" is the same place. But my grandfather was an orphan, so that side of the family tree is particularly murky...
Oh! Only tangentially related, but I have a second cousin out in Alabama who married her step-brother. They didn't become step-siblings until they were in their late teens, so it's not like they grew up together (well, not anymore so than kids the same age in a small town), but still... Roll Tide.
True, but considering I'm Jewish as far back as we can trace and there are no Jews in her ancestry as far back as she can trace, we're pretty distant cousins.
I was fortunate enough to sit through an impromptu family tree debate after I had been made aware that to some degree we are all related.
I lack the words to adequately describe the reactions of shock and horror when people who had been married for decades suddenly realized they shared real and somewhat close blood relation, some times only two or three generations apart.
People in small towns especially, go back only a couple generations and they all start merging. Then they act shocked our town of <5000 people is all related
This might be a really dumb question, but is it possible that any two human beings don't share a common ancestor? Like, do we all link back to a single bacteria or were there multiple "made" at once?
There is a genetic Adam and Eve. However, I don't think they existed at the same time. These were humans, not just apes/mammals/animals/bacteria. We are all distantly related.
We are also more related to mushrooms than trees are to mushrooms.
A quarter of us trace back to one mongol, fairly certain there’s going to be a point we all tie together to the same ape eating magic mushrooms in what would become Africa. Long ass time ago though
With how funky micro organisms are with sharing DNA I'm not sure it matters. I've heard it likened to the genetic tree turning into a bush instead whare it's a big mes of sharing of DNA across species.
If it required charts to explain and took years to work out then I'm guessing it probably wasn't first cousin's, and may not have even been second cousins. By the time you are at that level the risk is probably barely different than picking someone from the same country as you at random.
"The blood of the covenant is thicker than the water of the womb."
The saying (basically) means "the bond with the friends you make is stronger than happenstance family".
Remember, don't be bullied by family members who use "family" as their excuse to get you to do what they want without consideration of your own thoughts or feelings.
Two modern commentators, author Albert Jack and Messianic Rabbi Richard Pustelniak, claim that the original meaning of the expression was that the ties between people who have made a blood covenant (or have shed blood together in battle) were stronger than ties formed by "the water of the womb", thus "The blood of the covenant is thicker than the water of the womb". Neither of the authors cite any sources to support their claim.
Only 10 generations away (about 100-150 years), you already have 1024 ancestors. 20 generations and you have 1.048.576. And 30 generations get you 1.073.741.824.
In 1500 the world only had 450.000.000
This example only shows the direct family line (parents of parents of..) and no descendents of brothers and sisters.