drawGenealogy

Program for Simulating Random Family Histories

Written by Bernhard Haubold

Each diploid individual has two parents, a mother (ellipse) and a father (rectangle), four grandparents and so on. This exponential growth of the number of ancestors means that under a simple model of random mating the ancestors of any two individuals soon overlap. In addition, one or more universal ancestors rapidly appear in the population. At that point in time there are three types of individuals: Those who have left no descendants in the present, those who are ancestors of all extant individuals (universal ancestors), and those who left some descendants in the present generation (black). However, this situation is not stable and as we go further back in time we reach a phase, where all individuals are either universal ancestors or have left no descendants in the present. For more details on this see Rode, D. L. T., Olson, S., Chang, J. T. (2004). Modeling the recent common ancestry of all living humans. Nature, 431:562-566.
Population Size:
Number of Generations:
Seed for ranodm number generator (if left blank, the system clock is used):


Download Program

The stand-alone version of drawGenealogy generates LaTeX output. Its source code as well as an executable for Intel-Linux can be downloaded from here.

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