Leonardo da Vinci’s Y chromosome shared by living family descendants

phys.org

24 points·bookofjoe··10 comments

It is interesting that the average age of conception in the series is 33 years (21 generations in 700 years) It seems an old age, historically.

The age of coming of women in my country was 15 years old. I think it was common in Latin America. The age of consent is now 16 yo. In Colombian is 14 yo, I think.

What was the average age of conception for the last child?

We only know the average of the age of conception of the group of male descendants trace. I explained why I fancied the average age lower. What do you think could make it actually higher, hypothetically?

It depends on how many kids his descendants had. If it were, say, five kids on average, and we are tracing an average descendant, then the age of conception of child #3 can well be 33 years old.

This is the Y chromosome. On average men start families later than women do.

Your comment made me realize something: Men do start families later than women do, and it is mostly sons in their families who are recognized. The sons they have before starting families can go unnoticed. Now the older age average makes more sense.

This seems bizarre to me. Why do people think they'll learn anything from what few fragments of dna they can recover? From a single unique individual? Seems like a big waste of money.

tl;dr:

"15 direct male-line descendants related genealogically to both Leonardo's father and to his half-brother"

They haven't proven any genetic relationships between the currently alive and the ancient entombed bodies yet. So far they only confirmed that the currently alive people all share a straight-line male ancestor.

What would be missing to make the link between those two facts ? Im beginner in biology

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