Jacob
The pedigree begins with Jacob. The initialization uses a birth around 2006 BC, following his stated age of 130 at the entry into Egypt.
Genesis 47:9 ↗A separate model for comparison
ROC Pedigree Simulator
Follow Jacob’s lineage through individual births, families, and migrations, within a model adapted from Rohde, Olson, and Chang.
An assumption-based experiment. Biblical anchors define the starting history. The paths that follow are simulated possibilities, not a reconstruction of actual pedigrees or a measurement of anyone’s ancestry.
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55-million model
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The biblical foundation
One lineage, distinct from community identity
The household in Egypt
Seventy enumerated family members, with additional spouses. Known family links are retained; unknown ages and spouse details require stated assumptions.
Genesis 46:8–27 ↗The Exodus
The target is about 600,000 Israelite men aged 20 and older, with women and children additional. The displayed run reports its actual achieved count.
Exodus 12; Numbers 1 ↗Intermarriage operates throughout the 430 years in Egypt. A child inherits genealogical descent from either parent. Community membership is a separate state: marrying in does not itself make someone Jacob’s descendant, and leaving does not erase descent. At the Exodus, the Israelite community in the modeled Egyptian location moves to a broad Sinai–Levant cell; the wilderness journey is not spatially resolved within that cell. Descendants in other communities remain where they are.
After the Exodus, mate selection follows general ROC-style locality rules. There is no additional Jewish community marriage barrier. The 250-million version includes the specified Assyrian and Babylonian/Persian movements; the 55-million version does not. Neither reconstructs later Jewish endogamy or a complete diaspora migration history, which limits how the resulting spread can be interpreted historically.
The model is conditioned on the lineage surviving to the present. Failed survival conditions are recorded and excluded; descendants are never reintroduced to rescue a run. The biblical “mixed multitude” is acknowledged, but its unspecified size is not invented.
What changed, and what remains uncertain
Closer mechanisms. Explicit limits.
Individual pedigrees
Annual births and deaths replace regional ancestry-growth equations. Each birth selects eligible parents; descent is inherited from either parent, with no fractional ancestry injections.
ROC’s social geography
People live in nested regions, modeled countries, and towns. Migration occurs as discrete events, through local movement and dated interregional routes.
Intermarriage is an assumption
The Egyptian crossing rate controls new partner choices, not the fraction of all marriages. These rates and household membership rules are sensitivity assumptions, not historical measurements.
Not a full replication
This is an independent adaptation of the published methods. Some demographic controls, route rates, and starting details are underspecified in the paper. All selected choices are documented.
Population units, interpretation, and scientific qualifications
Adults, not a census. Map totals count modeled people aged 16 and older. As in ROC, births include only children destined to reach adulthood. The model does not estimate infant deaths or total historical all-age populations.
Computational scale. The 55-million version follows ROC’s population table and regional reductions after 1000 BC, preserving smaller populations more than uniform downscaling would. The 250-million version follows the world-total benchmarks and scaling described above. Each world percentage weights its simulated populations; it is not a measured percentage of today’s humanity.
Independent implementation. Fifteen thousand social units do not represent named historical towns. The recovered figure contains 496 country cells and 15,049 towns; ROC’s text reports 497 and 15,059. That source discrepancy remains unresolved. The map is schematic, with approximate route endpoints.
Recent years. ROC uses its 1970 table column for AD 2000. The 55-million version holds its final population targets fixed through AD 2026. The 250-million version continues the original simulator’s world-total curve with the final regional proportions. Neither claims a historically calibrated present-day population in every model cell.
Conditioning and uncertainty. Survival and approximate agreement with the Exodus anchor are acceptance conditions. Saved realizations illustrate stochastic variation; a small set of runs cannot support a precise probability that Jacob is an ancestor of every living person.
Pedigree, not DNA or identity. A genealogical ancestor need not contribute detectable DNA. Descent, Jewish religious or ethnic identity, and membership in a recorded historical community are different concepts. The historical population spreadsheet does not supply parent links or measured intermarriage rates.
Validation has limits. Code tests check inheritance, chronology, and counting. They do not establish historical accuracy or reproduce ROC’s published global common-ancestor dates. The original page’s simpler graph-model validation is separate.
55-million model documentation and downloads
Source basis
Rohde, Olson & Chang, “Modelling the recent common ancestry of all living humans,” Nature 431 (2004), 562–566, and Supplementary Methods B: lifespan and mating, pp. 1–2; migration, pp. 2–5; population and initialization, pp. 5–7. The Jacob-specific chronology and population anchors are additional biblical assumptions, not claims made by ROC.