Did you catch this story trending today from Science magazine? Researchers have been studying millions of family trees in online databases. (You didn't think your ancestry was private, did you?)
Scientists culled data from a whopping 5.3 million family trees "spanning 13 million individuals who lived between 1650 and 2000." Two fav highlights of mine:
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From 1650 to the start of the 19th century, the average married couple in Europe and North America were fourth cousins.
- According to the study's results, genetics contributes just 16 percent of what is necessary to see old age, as opposed to the 25 percent found in other studies.
Source: http://www.sciencemag.org/
The abstract: http://science.sciencemag.org/content/early/2018/02/28/science.aam9309
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Which reminds me of the old joke about cousins marrying:
