The most recent data I have seen shows in theory that ALL living modern humans can trace their existence back to no more than 5 individual females and no more that 30 individual males.
Speculation from the really exotic all the way down to perfectly plausible scientific projections are a lot of fun to bat back and forth, but for all practical purposes, it seems to me that the primitive, boring procedure of tracing actual familial lines and figuring out who is demonstrably related to whom is hardly obsolete. Sure, we can all come from the same DNA source and we can all be related to each other if we try hard enough, through clever wordplay or speculative, slightly massaged (perhaps) science, just as meteorites COULD very well take forms other than those we currently recognize. Maybe there are meteorites that look just like ping-pong paddles and are made of brie cheese. But if we're just talking about practical, day-to-day genealogy rather than expansive theoretical canvasses, surely it's still more useful to base it in empirical evidence....rather like using meteoritical science to identify meteorites, rather than posing lots of cool-sounding but unanswerable possibilities. ;-)
Gregory
