kiefbowl

Username checks out.

Gives perspective on how accelerated change has become in modern times.

Empires made calendars based on the first king, hundreds of years ended up being like a dozen kings.

Makes sense

For men, it's less, right? Your line could come from old guys.

The average mother having their average daughter at an average of 25 is historically probably quite an overestimate. 20 would be a much safer guess, but there's a good chance it's lower than that too.

Doesn't change the math that much though, easily less than a thousand generations since the advent of agriculture either way.

Potentially yeah. Like if you come from a line of men that are horny and virile only in old age, say 80 is the average age to sire a firstborn son, you're only 20 fathers away from the fall of the Roman Empire.....

Edit: Math and typo

What impressed me more was just how MANY ancestors you would have at that 40 generations back.

Lots of babies and children died before adulthood though, so its actually not a bad bet for 25 as an average birthing age for one that survives to adulthood. Not that every woman would lose her first 2 kids or whatever but enough certainly did to drive the average up somewhat from what it would be with modern medicine.

Always remember: these people were DNA-identical to us. All this life-saving, life-extending, life-improving technology... is always just 2-3 generations from poof

I know someone that has a father that was 50 when he had them and then their grandfather was 50 when they had his dad. Not sure if it continues like that after the grandfather, not sure if they even know. They're the youngest, so their brothers kids would have a higher number.

Mathematically it's a lot. Realistically a lot of those ancestors end up being common after 4-6 generations.

Surprisingly no. At least in central and western Europe, child marriages were very much a nobility thing. Securing alliances and such. And even for those the first child may well have been much later.

I don’t have an individual statistic on hand but https://fakehistoryhunter.net/2026/01/18/age-of-marriage-giving-birth-in-medieval-europe/ has collected a bunch of sources that suggest that the usual age of first marriage in medieval Europe for women was around their mid 20s, pretty much the same as today.

So the voices of other memory would be less crowded than expected. (IYKYK.)

!anythingbutmetric@discuss.tchncs.de

You're joking though. Right? Or are you thinking about wealthy people? The ones who might be written about?

I come from several generations of "prom night" conceptions and "shot gun weddings".

Go count how many sex acts were necessary for your existence.

Read the page I linked. It specifically lists sources that specifically talk about peasants in medieval Europe who on average married later than nobility.

Prom night conceptions and shotgun weddings are a phenomenon of the 20th and 21st century and would have been considered absolutely scandalous for most of history.

I pointed out that the people in those photos screaming at Ruby Bridges are still alive and vote like mad and my brother was flabbergasted.

i looked that up a while ago and apparently the median age of first childbirth was around 21 or 22 for women, though this depends on wealth: wealthy people had children earlier (on average), going down to about 16-18 for many noble women.

poor people often didn't have children at all.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Marriageable_age

You can't just look at the age of the mother when she has her first daughter. You also have to consider her age at the time of her last daughter. Even if she has her "prom night" daughter at 18, if she later has another daughter at 36, we're looking at an average age of 27.

I'm sorry, but I am also a source.

Anecdotal data isn’t

uhm, actually the age of marriage basically exclusively depended on the real circumstances. in the roman empire, it was much lower, because rome was eternally at war, which consumed a whole lot of soldiers. that would not have been possible if women hadn't had a lot of children, for which you'd have to start early.

the christian religion increased the minimum marriage age from 12 (!!) to 15 in the 3rd century CE (late roman empire), because rome stopped being a war-based country and there was simply no need for that many soldiers anymore.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Marriageable_age

also the same link explains that the average age of first childbirth was significantly lower for american settlers than for european peasants in the early modern age; again the reasoning is that the american settlers were a highly expansive population (roughly a doubling of population every 20 years!! in the time period 1650 - 1880).

see my other reply below

By this math, humans have only been around for about 80,000 mothers.

i think it's also worth noting that a whole lot of children basically died due to malnutrition ... think about it. contraception was not existent, so if a woman gets pregnant 8 times, but the family can only feed 2 children, that effectively means that 6 would essentially starve (or die due to other "preventable" diseases, but actually the better prevention than modern medicine is just food, since enough food strengthenes the immune system).

even if you had modern medicine at the time, children would still starve; the thing that really drives down child mortality is just a lower birth-rate altogether, since the family can still feed 2 children, regardless of whether they actually make 2 or 8 babies.

I'm actually surprised at the reactions.

This is a very, "Yeah..." thing.

Maybe it's people's concept of time is centred around the ego. Like, they don't realise how short 80 years is. That's only 80 orbits 🤣

Wait until you find out the dinosaurs were basically "yesterday" in Earth's timeline.

We're very brief. "Life's short" isn't just some quirky saying.

Yeah. As society becomes more complex, maturity and preparedness comes much later. "Growing up" takes much longer.

Go back a thousand years, things were much simpler. There was less to navigate and learn so "the real world" started much earlier.

Look at any other creature without society and see how their life unfolds. They're "adult" very quickly because within a short time they've got enough figured out to go out into the world alone.

Meanwhile, we're now at a point where it's normal to have a first child in the 30s and 40s, feeling completely unready.

I think about this, and do this math in my head too, all the time.
80 mothers to Ancient Rome. 400 mothers to start of farming.

You know how the Mormons keep genealogy records for, like, everyone they possibly can? I am American so we may be more mixed than some places but those records went back pretty far and out in a lot of directions geographically. No overlap, lots and lots of people. I mean at some point mathematically it's more people than the population of the world so you have to be right but they had 20 or more generations in some directions, it was thousands of people on that chart going back hundreds of years, it was crazy.

I also did notice that most of my ancestresses did marry between 25-28, not 14 as Little House on the Prairie had me believing before.

I looked up the average age of mothers at the time of their first child birth in 1863 because I really badly wanted to make a joke about a "score" being 20 for that reason.

Sadly the average age was 22-26 so my day is ruined.

It is. But only as data point(s), not as a trend or generalization.

Anything but metrics…

According to this scale, Aboriginal Australian cultures are 2,600 mothers old.

I came here to say "obviously American, anything but metrics...", but you bet me to it.

The advent of agriculture (11.5 kya) was 4.5 hectomothers ago

Haha reminds me of that other stat how you only need to strip/peel a some graphite on a piece of tape like 20 times to reach a single atom thickness (graphene).

The greatest difference between us and our distant ancestors isn't intelligence. It's the knowledge we've inherited. Education is humanity's greatest achievement.

We all stand on the shoulders of those who came before us. I'm grateful to those who lifted us up, and I'll humbly do my part to lift those who come after us.

Ehm ... Metric .... Time?

I may be an ignorant American, but can you explain metric time to me? What is the SI unit of time? Days? I'll meet you in 4 decidays, 3 centidays, and 20 millidays.

That's a beautiful way of thinking about it!

This is actually a great perspective to point out against anti-intellectual arguments like evolution being fake, when people ask why humans are not evolving. What kind of evolution can you expect in 450 iterations? That's nothing in the timeline of the earth. Plus 450 mothers is already more than what some religious fanatics claim is the age of the earth.

Half a cup of seconds

Pre-modern first-birth ages were more in the range 15 to 20. So rather 5 to 6 mothers per century.

If of one person today every previous generation ancestral parents only consists of unique pairs then go back 80 generations that’s 2^80^ of people had to exist during that 80th generation back. That’s more than 1.2 septillion so a one with 24 zeros. So that’s impossible that’s more people than have existed in history. Meaning that inbreeding has happened in everyone’s family tree. So lots of distant cousin marriages. But unfortunately also some fucked up shit like some of your ancestor’s parents are brother and sister or father and daughter. So if you follow your paternal line back the number of dads is less than the number of mothers.

And in certain parts of the world a significant portion of those ancestors is Genghis Khan.

Kings tend to have shorter lifespans, though, what with other people wanting to be king, or for someone else to be king instead of the current one, or for there to just not be any king at all...

I think it's the opposite. Most people aren't that egotistical. We all feel quite small relative to history. But I think OP is highlighting that even history is quite short. Ancient Rome, which feels like a very long time ago, is actually only 80 generations ago. If "life's short", then 80 lives is short too.

USians are so insulated that they don't know the rest of the world has 10 hours in a day, 100 minutes each.

/cc @Magnum@infosec.pub