Atavus Jacob Har Levi Sapir
how much did he contribute to me?
Atavus - one translation from Latin is:
great-great-great-grandfather
I happen to have a picture of one of my 16 great-great-great-grandfathers (atavus), one Jacob Ha Levi Sapir.
I don’t think I could find any other portraits of ancestors from that generation. Jacob’s portrait survived because he wrote a book “Even Sapir” recounting his travels.
“In 1848, he was commissioned by the Jewish community of the latter city [Jerusalem] to travel through the southern countries to collect alms for the poor of Jerusalem. In 1854 he undertook a second tour to collect funds for the construction of the Hurva Synagogue in the Jewish Quarter, which led him in 1859 to Yemen, British India, Egypt, and Australia.”
Wikipedia: (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jacob_Saphir)
In theory I inherited 3.125% of my genetic material from him (1/32). I say in theory because the figure is a probability or “on average”. Each generation, half your DNA comes from each parent. However during meiosis, crossing over between chromosomes in each of your parents produces chromosomes which can have any combination of your grandparent’s chromosomes from all maternal to all paternal and any combination in between. So you get half your DNA from your mother and half from your father but each parent doesn’t necessarily contribute equal amounts from each of your grandparents, but “on average” they do.
Jacob Har Levi Sapir (1822–1886)
Just because a nucleotide at a particular location is identical with that of a particular ancestor, it doesn’t mean that you inherited it from that ancestor. Since 99.9% of your genome is shared with other humans, there’s a greater chance that it was inherited from any one of the other 61 forebears of the last 5 generations without having originated with that ancestor.
That's him in the top row with the star. I'm the one in the bottom row. He's my father's father's mother's father's father.
