Possibly, but not necessarily, and we’ll probably never know, because most family genealogies go back only a couple of centuries.
According to the Bible, we all descended from Adam and Eve, in which case we’re all related to each other. Lending some support to this thesis is the fact that all people everywhere fight like in-laws.
But let’s say Adam and Eve didn’t start it all. That leaves science, which estimates the universe is ~13.8 billion years old. As it’s unlikely humans popped out of the Big Bang — at first there weren’t even any stars, nor planets to live on — life must have evolved, no matter what Herschel Walker says.
From what? When Earth formed ~4.54 billion years ago from cooling gases, it was too hot for life. Probably the first life forms, about ~4 billion years ago, were microbes that could tolerate high temperatures and the methane atmosphere that existed then. But if we’re descendants of microbes, you and I didn’t necessarily descend from the same microbe.
We might have if the first microbe arrived on Earth as a passenger on a space rock. In that case, maybe all microbes were of the same family, and we’re related no matter which microbe we came from. But that would be much less likely if microbes were created by chemical reactions here on Earth, because those reactions would be occurring in many places simultaneously, and creating trillions of microbes independent of and unrelated to each other.
However, it’s unlikely we evolved from the earliest life. How could that be? Simple. The microbes may have killed themselves off by altering their environment, as we’re doing to ourselves now. For example, by converting methane to oxygen while processing their food, until there was no methane left. And then life restarted with something that could live on oxygen, say, bacteria. Here again, the conditions allowing one bacterium to be created would allow many bacteria to be created, in many places, like lightning strikes starting forest fires.
So regardless of whether our ancestors were microbes or bacteria, you and I probably came from different undersea volcanic vents or terrestrial hot springs; and just because we fight like relatives doesn’t mean we are relatives.
Images: Above, old family photo; below, family tree (click to enlarge)
