DNA says you’re related to a Viking, a medieval German Jew or a 1700s enslaved African? What a genetic match really means
Mathematical research demonstrates the following surprising fact. In any given population, the number of lines in your family tree that reach any specific medieval person is about the same between you and everyone else who belongs to the same population you do. In other words, everyone alive today is equally related, genealogically, to all medieval people from that population.
The next step is to understand how many ancestors you actually inherit DNA from. Surprisingly again, very few.
