Our common royal background
Posted: Sun Jan 10, 2016 4:57 pm
Bonjour mes cousins,
This morning I started rereading Easy French Reader at the section that tells the stories of Vercingétorix, Clovis, and my ancestor Charlemagne. What! Tom claims Charlemagne, Charles the Great, the Holy Roman Emperor as an ancestor? Yes I do! And, if you are a European, so can you! It seems that almost all people of European ancestry are descendants of Charlemagne.
It all has to do with the fact that as we calculate our ancestors and go back forty-one generations, about 1,000 years, we end up with 2,199,023,255,552 people. The problems is that there weren't over two trillion people alive then. And, there aren't that many people alive today. So, what gives? The answer lies in pedigree collapse, that is when cousins marry cousins. This article from National Geographic and The Atlantic explain this in more detail. They conclude that everyone of European descent is descended from all the people who were alive then and have living descendants today. And, all human beings have a common ancestor no more than four thousand years ago (UC Davis).
So I wish all of you, my royal cousins, a good weekend.
This morning I started rereading Easy French Reader at the section that tells the stories of Vercingétorix, Clovis, and my ancestor Charlemagne. What! Tom claims Charlemagne, Charles the Great, the Holy Roman Emperor as an ancestor? Yes I do! And, if you are a European, so can you! It seems that almost all people of European ancestry are descendants of Charlemagne.
It all has to do with the fact that as we calculate our ancestors and go back forty-one generations, about 1,000 years, we end up with 2,199,023,255,552 people. The problems is that there weren't over two trillion people alive then. And, there aren't that many people alive today. So, what gives? The answer lies in pedigree collapse, that is when cousins marry cousins. This article from National Geographic and The Atlantic explain this in more detail. They conclude that everyone of European descent is descended from all the people who were alive then and have living descendants today. And, all human beings have a common ancestor no more than four thousand years ago (UC Davis).
So I wish all of you, my royal cousins, a good weekend.