I was born on September 27 1920, in Wilmington Delaware. Recokning four generations a century I had 32 great-great-great grandparents alive as young adults in 1820. Sixteen were living in the Rhineland and Poland, four in Ireland,eight were farmers of English descent living on the Eastern Shore of Maryland, two were New York Dutch, and the remaining two a refugee Frenchman and his MicMac Indian wife, Mahala. Going back in time the number increases by a factor of 16 every century, so that in 1520, while Magellan was making his circumnavigation, I (and you of course) had about 131,072 ancestors. Mine were mostly inwestern europe, but about 4100 were Indian Aborogines roaming the American forests. If one carries a calculation like this further backwards he finds that by 1220 the number of ancestors exceeds the then population of the world (360 million). So the fact that my patronymic goes back to an obscure rowdy knight named Volquin who was kicked out of the little village of Stommel west of Cologne in the thirteenth century can have no significance but to attest to the longevity and artificiality of a legal convention such as the paternal line. For a race that issues from the womb, the maternal line would seem more natural.
If we pursue the calculation to 10,000 B.C., when mankind had emerged from the Ice ages, and the population of the whole world was about 4 million, the number of ancestors that each of us had alive then was 10 to the power 30, a number so large that it is the cube of the total number of people that ever lived. I cannot but help believing that despite geographical isolation, racial and religous differences, and because of inevitable intermarriage and considering the long-time view, that we are all related, many times over. It seems inescapable - and to me very comforting - to believe that we are all kinfolk, whelped from a common litter.
 Stommel, H. M., 1995