When I was four or five, I asked my mom about her “mommy and daddy”. She explained that this is who “grandma” and “grandpa” were. Then I asked her about grandma and grandpa’s mommy and daddy. She patiently explained that too. And their parents, and their parents’ parents…? Where did it end? I wanted to know. I still remember a befuddled look and a mumbled response from my mom about how God started it all. That answer didn’t quite satisfy me. “What about God’s parents?” I’d asked. Well, now I had her stumped.

Tracing our roots back, even just a handful of generations, has the capacity to elicit feelings of wonder and awe. The mathematics alone are staggering: two parents, four grandparents, eight great-grandparents… and on it goes, doubling each time. Going back 10 generations from ourselves, we meet our great (x8) grandparents, and there’s 1,024 of them. If we go back 10 more generations, we meet our great (x18) grandparents, and their number has reached a whopping 1,048,576. Because people routinely marry their distant relatives, no one has a perfect doubling each generation — something genealogists call “pedigree collapse”. But still, it’s mind-blowing to consider how few generations one needs to go back to connect to vast populations on the planet. Of course, ultimately, every living creature on the planet is a distant cousin, as we all descended from the same primordial goo. And if that’s not humbling, I don’t know what is.