John Hawks, on the mathematics of family trees and recombinant DNA: In practice, even though we have billions of nucleotides, our DNA cannot follow billions of genealogical lines. Recombination over 30 — 40 generations does not divide chromosomes down to individual nucleotides. In the medium term, most human DNA is separated by recombination hotspots into … Continue reading Odd Fact: you aren’t related to most of your ancestors.