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Why We're All Jesus' Children - Go back a few millenniums, and we've all got the same ancestors. By Steve Olson

Don't worry about the title, the above article is an interesting explanation about how you don't have to go back too far to get to a point where everyone on earth was your ancestor.

This is a little hard to follow, but as the authors have published in Nature, I assume they know their maths :

Say you go back 120 generations, to about the year 1000 B.C. According to the results presented in our Nature paper, your ancestors then included everyone in the world who has descendants living today. And if you compared a list of your ancestors with a list of anyone else's ancestors, the names on the two lists would be identical.

This is a very bizarre result (the math behind it is solid, though—here's a brief, semitechnical explanation of our findings). It means that you and I are descended from all of the Africans, Australians, Native Americans, and Europeans who were alive three millenniums ago and still have descendants living today. That's also why so many people living today could be descended from Jesus. If Jesus had children (a big if, of course) and if those children had children so that Jesus' lineage survived, then Jesus is today the ancestor of almost everyone living on Earth. True, Jesus lived two rather than three millenniums ago, but a person's descendants spread quickly from well-connected parts of the world like the Middle East.

This concluding paragraph is of interest:

People may like to think that they're descended from some ancient group while other people are not. But human ancestry doesn't work that way, since we all share the same ancestors just a few millenniums ago. As that idea becomes more widely accepted, arguments over who's descended from Jesus won't result in lawsuits. And maybe, just maybe, people will have one less reason to feel animosity toward other branches of the human family.

Well, yes, but can it also be used in a quasi-political way to argue against the special "racial" rights that the West now gives to the present descendants of the original indigenous populations?

(I originally had "ownership" instead of "racial".)