pedigree collapse

English edit

pedigree collapse (uncountable)

(genealogy) The phenomenon in which ancestral inbreeding causes the number of a descendant’s distinct ancestors to be smaller than that predicted by a binary tree ( $\sum _{i=1}^{n}2^{i}$ , where $n$ represents the number of generations).
- 1989, Jonathan Benthall, “The ‘Annual Review’ 1988 Reviewed: He but There-to Come(s) No(t) / Which-Who Fear(s) Deep Water”, in Anthropology Today, V, № 5 (October 1989), page 16:
  Less well-known is the argument that we may all have a single mitochondrial foundress — not necessarily a single ancestress — owing to the likelihood of ‘lineage extinction’ and ‘pedigree collapse’ as a result of mating with cousins, small population sizes, and high mortality before reproductive age.

phenomenon in genealogy