Every human being alive today shares a single common ancestor who lived as recently as 3,000 years ago — not a mythical figure, but an ordinary person who happened to be in the right place at the right time — meaning every emperor, every slave, every nameless laborer of the ancient world is either an ancestor to everyone now living, or to no one, and we will never know which

The most recent person from whom every human being now alive is descended lived approximately 3,000 years ago. The figure sounds wrong. It is not. It is the result of one of the cleaner findings in mathematical genealogy, published in Nature in 2004 by Douglas Rohde of MIT, the science writer Steve Olson, and Joseph [...] The post Every human being alive today shares a single common ancestor who lived as recently as 3,000 years ago — not a mythical figure, but an ordinary person who happened to