Yep, the only thing that’s lost is any mutations unique to that “bloodline”.
That rarely happens, and when it does it’s almost always something that wasn’t beneficial to begin with.
We’re all just different combinations of the same DNA. Some of our ancestors were just isolated enough for already old mutations to become concentrated enough to get expressed in the majority of the population.
Like, going off memory but there’s like 17 different mutations for eye color?
None of them cease to exist when they’re not expressed, and they still have the same chance of showing up later.
The Blue Fugette’s from Kentucky is a great example. The original heads of that family was a French man and an Irish woman who’s bloodlines hadn’t crossed in probably thousands of years.
But they both had the same rare recessive trait for their blood to be less oxygenated than normal. So their kids had a blue hue. Because they moved to an isolated location with a small amount of other families, their kids with double recessive genes lead to a bunch of blue people in a couple generations after it had spread in the population.
Even if they had all died out for some reason, it wouldn’t stop another random couple with the resseive genes from meeting and moving to another isolated population.
Yep, the only thing that’s lost is any mutations unique to that “bloodline”.
That rarely happens, and when it does it’s almost always something that wasn’t beneficial to begin with.
We’re all just different combinations of the same DNA. Some of our ancestors were just isolated enough for already old mutations to become concentrated enough to get expressed in the majority of the population.
Like, going off memory but there’s like 17 different mutations for eye color?
None of them cease to exist when they’re not expressed, and they still have the same chance of showing up later.
The Blue Fugette’s from Kentucky is a great example. The original heads of that family was a French man and an Irish woman who’s bloodlines hadn’t crossed in probably thousands of years.
But they both had the same rare recessive trait for their blood to be less oxygenated than normal. So their kids had a blue hue. Because they moved to an isolated location with a small amount of other families, their kids with double recessive genes lead to a bunch of blue people in a couple generations after it had spread in the population.
Even if they had all died out for some reason, it wouldn’t stop another random couple with the resseive genes from meeting and moving to another isolated population.