I would expect the general breakdown to be a few recent generations of maybe not farmers, several thousand years of mostly farmers, and then the remainder of the time between the dawn of humanity and the beginning of agriculture being “farmers didn’t exist yet”.
Exactly when agriculture began isn’t an entirely settled question, but there doesn’t seem to be any suggestion that it was early enough to make up any more than a small fraction of the last 300k years.
Even if you include some proto farming, like a hunter-gatherer occasionally choosing to scatter seeds in a convenient foraging spot, I don’t know if you get back to 150kya (or whenever the halfway point would be when accounting for changing generation times, and counting ancestors rather than years)
Or are we thinking that it gets weirder when you account for population size expanding after farming? That would provide more people to be distinct ancestors (past a certain point, everyone who was alive at the time either has no living descendants or is a universal ancestor), but I’m dubious of that out weighing the long (long) period of pre-farming.
That does make it more difficult. Order of magnitude (or more) more people in each generation after farming, but more than an order of magnitude more years in the period before farming.
The “if you go back far enough, everyone was your ancestor” argument only kicks in part way through the farming period whereas it would be in full effect for pre-farming. But also probably a greater proportion of hunter gatherers died without leaving any descendants, or have had their line of descendants die out in the time since.
Ok, you’ve successfully induced uncertainty. I don’t feel able to do math to come to a clear answer.
‘Pedigree collapse’ happens shockingly fast. You apparently do not have to go back more than 1-2000 years before everyone shares a common ancestor and the pedigrees are all linked. So, you will have pedigree collapse in your local population well before that. This means that your particular ancestry can’t matter much (since soon you’ll share the same total population of unique ancestors as everyone else), only the ratios of ever-farmers:ever-nots over the total human population history. Since the non-farming lifestyle only supports on the order of millions of humans rather than billions of humans, the ratio is pretty decisive. Farming just supports much, much, much larger populations of humans, and thus, ancestors. As long as you are not too close to the Neolithic (as we are not inasmuch as farming began ~11,000 years ago), I would expect the exponential rise of the farming human population to have long ago reduced your hunter-gatherer ancestry to some extremely small percentage of ‘all your ancestors’ like 1%, and thus extremely far from >50%.
OWID claims that there were ~9 billion people, or about 8%, of people before the agricultural revolution. So I don’t think you can get to quite as low as ~1%.
If we make the simplifying assumption that everybody in the past are ancestors, then we get 8% non-farmers. This assumption is ofc false, but if it’s true across a fairly small number of generations, farmers will outweigh non-farmers as you say.
According to this article, the halfway point for “number of humans who have ever lived” is between 1 CE and 1200 CE.
I would expect the general breakdown to be a few recent generations of maybe not farmers, several thousand years of mostly farmers, and then the remainder of the time between the dawn of humanity and the beginning of agriculture being “farmers didn’t exist yet”.
Exactly when agriculture began isn’t an entirely settled question, but there doesn’t seem to be any suggestion that it was early enough to make up any more than a small fraction of the last 300k years.
Even if you include some proto farming, like a hunter-gatherer occasionally choosing to scatter seeds in a convenient foraging spot, I don’t know if you get back to 150kya (or whenever the halfway point would be when accounting for changing generation times, and counting ancestors rather than years)
Or are we thinking that it gets weirder when you account for population size expanding after farming? That would provide more people to be distinct ancestors (past a certain point, everyone who was alive at the time either has no living descendants or is a universal ancestor), but I’m dubious of that out weighing the long (long) period of pre-farming.
Yes. Keep in mind that there’s like an order of magnitude more people post agricultural revolution.
That does make it more difficult. Order of magnitude (or more) more people in each generation after farming, but more than an order of magnitude more years in the period before farming.
The “if you go back far enough, everyone was your ancestor” argument only kicks in part way through the farming period whereas it would be in full effect for pre-farming. But also probably a greater proportion of hunter gatherers died without leaving any descendants, or have had their line of descendants die out in the time since.
Ok, you’ve successfully induced uncertainty. I don’t feel able to do math to come to a clear answer.
‘Pedigree collapse’ happens shockingly fast. You apparently do not have to go back more than 1-2000 years before everyone shares a common ancestor and the pedigrees are all linked. So, you will have pedigree collapse in your local population well before that. This means that your particular ancestry can’t matter much (since soon you’ll share the same total population of unique ancestors as everyone else), only the ratios of ever-farmers:ever-nots over the total human population history. Since the non-farming lifestyle only supports on the order of millions of humans rather than billions of humans, the ratio is pretty decisive. Farming just supports much, much, much larger populations of humans, and thus, ancestors. As long as you are not too close to the Neolithic (as we are not inasmuch as farming began ~11,000 years ago), I would expect the exponential rise of the farming human population to have long ago reduced your hunter-gatherer ancestry to some extremely small percentage of ‘all your ancestors’ like 1%, and thus extremely far from >50%.
OWID claims that there were ~9 billion people, or about 8%, of people before the agricultural revolution. So I don’t think you can get to quite as low as ~1%.
If we make the simplifying assumption that everybody in the past are ancestors, then we get 8% non-farmers. This assumption is ofc false, but if it’s true across a fairly small number of generations, farmers will outweigh non-farmers as you say.
According to this article, the halfway point for “number of humans who have ever lived” is between 1 CE and 1200 CE.