Given how common the practice of slavery was in centuries and millennia past, and how recently the last living ancestor of all now-living humans plausibly walked the earth ( <a href="https://www.nature.com/articles/nature02842" rel="nofollow">https://www.nature.com/articles/nature02842</a> ), it is trivial to argue that ~99.9% of now-living humans had <i>many</i> slave-owning direct ancestors. (And that any exceptions would both occur in tiny / very isolated / marginalized minority populations, and be utterly unverifiable.)<p>So - why the current obsession with the subject? My sense is that identifying & denouncing anything tied to slavery is a current fad among social groups who waste far too much time practicing & posturing over ideology. And, with how sh*tty the future is looking for the younger generations now, anything that lets them denounce older people is probably extra-attractive.