The Coalescent Effective Size of Age - Structured Populations

We establish convergence to the Kingman coalescent for a class of age-structured population models with time-constant population size. Time is discrete with unit called a year. Offspring numbers in a year may depend on mother's age. 1. Introduction. The well-known coalescent process describes how family lines merge in a sample from a large population, when time is traced backward. It is a continuous time Markov chain which keeps record of branches starting from n leaves and going through n − 1 pairwise mergers toward the root of a so-called ultrametric tree. The number of branches is reduced from k, 2 ≤ k ≤ n, to k − 1 at the rate