Who Were Your Millionth-Great-Grandparents?
"Human civilization began about 10,000 years ago with dawn of agriculture (give or
take a millennia or so). This seems like such a long time that it can be hard to reconcile with the short span of our lives."
"But there is another way to look at it that puts not just civilization, but the whole of your ancestry, in a different light."
"Each of us constitutes a generation. We are the children of our parents who were the children of their parents (your grandparents) who were children of their parents (your great-grandparents)."
"You are, therefore, the latest step in a ladder of generations stretching backward in time and history. If we take each generation to be 25 years in length, then we can see something remarkable unspool."