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“We are all related,” writes Pinker — “not just in the obvious sense that we are all descended from the same population of the first humans, but also because everyone’s ancestors mated with everyone else’s at many points since that dawn of humanity. There aren’t enough ancestors to go around for everyone to have a family tree of his or her own. So it is a mathematical necessity, not a surprise, that genealogy will turn up strange bedfellows. George W. Bush is a distant cousin of his electoral opponents Al Gore and John Kerry (as well as of Richard Nixon, Ernest Hemingway, Queen Elizabeth, and, through her, every European monarch).”
Commenter fnarf99 puts it this way: “For some of us, tracing our ancestors is a way to sew ourselves into the cloth of history. I mean, we all know the generalities of the story, but finding out the exact time and place and people of your family makes the past tactilely real.”
