Originally posted by Bardock42
That fraction makes no sense...
It works out fairly well, actually.
If we go back 10 generations, we have a total of 1024 ancestors (to find the number of ancestors by generation, it is simply 2^n. n = generations. One generation back equals two: your mom and dad. Capisce?).
If you have 1024 ancestors, then they can work out as follows:
341 Chinese, 341 black, and 342 Native American.
That would make you 33.3% black, 33.3% Chinese, 33.4% Native American. Pretty dang close to 1/3.
In a casual conversation, you would say, "oh yeah...I'm 1/3 Black, Native American, and Chinese" because prime factorization isn't something people quite grasp, casually (because no power of 2^n will ever have a prime factor of three...making it impossible to ever be perfectly a third of anything in a finite set of ancestors).
edit - I'm wrong. It works out with incest. 😘 You can have 1/3 ancestory, perfectly. 😘