Statistical Analysis of Genealogical Trees for Polygamic Species

Abstract

Repetitions within a given genealogical tree provides some information about the degree of consanguineity of a population. They can be analyzed with techniques usually employed in statistical physics when dealing with fixed point transformations. In particular we show that the tree features strongly depend on the fractions of males and females in the population, and also on the offspring probability distribution. We check different possibilities, some of them relevant to human groups, and compare them with simulations.