[ExI] digital resurrection of a genome

spike spike66 at att.net
Fri Jul 3 01:41:22 UTC 2015


Suppose a guy is married three times and has at least a couple (but as many
as four) girlfriends on the side, and it becomes apparent that he is the
father of at least 25 children, 19 of whom were borne by women who were his
wife at the time of the birth.  A century passes.  Thousands of people are
his direct descendants, out of which dozens get DNA tested.  Those
descendants do genealogy and find each other by various means, FTDNA,
AncestryDNA, 23andMe, such as that.  They form a rollicking continuous
online family reunion.

 

In theory, with sufficient persistence and determination, those descendants
could compare their genomes, look at the shared segments in FTDNA, and
gradually reconstruct the entire genome of the long-perished prolific
ancestor.

 

Is there a flaw in my reasoning anywhere?

 

spike

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