Recovering the Brownian coalescent point process from the Kingman coalescent by conditional sampling

Abstract

We consider a continuous population whose dynamics is described by the standard stationary Fleming–Viot process, so that the genealogy of $n$ uniformly sampled individuals is distributed as the Kingman $n$-coalescent. In this note, we study some genealogical properties of this population when the sample is conditioned to fall entirely into a subpopulation with most recent common ancestor (MRCA) shorter than $\varepsilon$. First, using the comb representation of the total genealogy (Lambert and Uribe Bravo (P-Adic Numbers Ultrametric Anal. Appl. 9 (2017) 22–38)), we show that the genealogy of the descendance of the MRCA of the sample on the timescale $\varepsilon$ converges as $\varepsilon\to0$. The limit is the so-called Brownian coalescent point process (CPP) stopped at an independent Gamma random variable with parameter $n$, which can be seen as the genealogy at a large time of the total population of a rescaled critical birth–death process, biased by the $n$th power of its size. Second, we show that in this limit the coalescence times of the $n$ sampled individuals are i.i.d. uniform random variables in $(0,1)$. These results provide a coupling between two standard models for the genealogy of a random exchangeable population: the Kingman coalescent and the Brownian CPP.