Royal Roots ?

E

Epictetus

here & now
Registered Senior Member
Hello, I am new here and joined this forum just to ask this question/these questions:

A few years back I came across an article that says Brooke Shields, and you and me are related to Edward III, the Prophet Mohammed and many other luminaries.

A math Ph.D. friend of mine explained to me how someone who lived a few hundred years ago, like King Edward III, would have so many descendents today that his and those of (for example) my earlier ancestors must have married at some point. Now this makes some sense, but what of the fact that I have no British ancestors as far as I know, and the ones I know of from the mid-1800's onward never married a Briton (anyone who could be more likely than anyone in my family to be related to Edward III)?

Also it occurs to me that while Edward III was siring children, so were many other men (while women birthed them), so don't they have just as many descendants crowding the world these days as Edward III?

And finally, what about any particular person, say, in South Korea or Zimbabwe, or Peru who are quite certain no British descendant of Edward III, or any other Caucasian has married into their family tree ever?

The article does claim that every one alive today has royal ancestors, Edward III or some other. I just cannot see how this can be, especially for non-European people.
Could someone either enlighten me or agree with me please?
 
The article is wrong.

While certainly anyone who was alive several centuries ago would nowadays have many descendants (thousands to millions), not EVERYONE alive today would be their descendant.

You should check into a genealogy library - it would fascinate you to learn who your particular ancestors might have been. If you are caucasian in the US or Europe, it is quite probable you have British 'royalty' or European 'royalty' ancestors. But the people of China almost certainly do not; just as you likely don't have Chinese 'royalty' ancestry.

In order to find a common ancestor of EVERYONE, scientists have to go back quite a few more generations, to a person called either Y-Chromosome Adam or Mitochondrial-Eve. You should read through those articles, as they will likely explain the errors of the article you read.


PS - Welcome to Sciforums!
 
I learn from somewhere that humans are evolved forms of some ancient type of monkeys or chimpanzees.:)
regards.
 
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arauca said:
You learned the wrong thing , We may have a common ancestor .

God knows how far back and how it happened
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Even scientists have proved it & we have scientific evidence of this & u r talking abt which realm?could u clarify pls....:)
regards.
 
indianmath said:
Even scientists have proved it & we have scientific evidence of this & u r talking abt which realm?could u clarify pls....:)
regards.
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I think he means that monkeys are not apes. We evolved from apes and not chimpanzees, who also evolved from apes.
 
All this reminds me of an episode of My Name is Earl in which Earl sends his rather dumb, thirty-year old brother Randy back to high school. Earl is picking Randy up after class one day, and Randy seems rather confused, or perhaps awestruck.

Randy: Did you know we all used to be monkeys?
Earl: No. But what were we before that?
Randy: I dunno. I don't even remember being a monkey.
 
I’m not sure if this helps you Epictetus, but my understanding is that the logic that underlies this idea says that if you have two parents, four grandparents, eight great-grandparents, etc. it doesn’t actually take that many generations until your projected number of ancestors exceeds the actual population. Therefore, everyone from the population of that time is effectively your ancestor. As you have pointed out, where there is isolation between different populations the logic doesn’t follow. But it is reasonable, for example, to suggest that all western Europeans and all North Americans who are descendant Europeans are likely direct descendants of Charlemagne.
 
Ancestral connection goes further back if you go with Primordial Ooze(Primordial Soup etc), however due to lifeforms evolving you wouldn't be able to trace connections since the number of gene pairings would be far lesser being a less complex organism.

Of course there are many Fringe and complete Pseudoscience perceptions of where everything comes from, that's what happens when you have a world of people trying to compute an answer with limited information or flawed understanding.
 
@Ken --

Don't forget that the practice of marrying your cousin is quite common even to this day, so that has to be factored into the equations too.
 
Indeed, Arioch. In fact it doesn’t require anything so close as cousins marrying. By the time you are numbering possible ancestor slots, as it were, in the hundreds of millions it is inevitable that many of those will actually be the same person. At a certain number of generations you will reach the point when any individual will have a better than fifty per cent chance of being your direct ancestor. A few generations more and the probabilities become so high as to be close to certain. That would be the bare mathematics of it.

I was just testing out the mathematics for myself and I was estimating the point where the actual population became less than the projected ancestors as around 28 generations which, at four generations per century would put you in the fourteenth century – right around the time of Edward III, which is why, I suppose, he is cited as the royal ancestor of us all. I cited Charlemagne, actually because he was the historic figure I had heard cited when I first encountered this idea. But since he was eighth to ninth century, and his influence was a little more pan-European than Edward III’s he seemed to fit the bill as so likely as to be tantamount to certain.
 
Aqueous Id said:
And let us not forget: we're related to banans.
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I read that 60% of our DNA we share with bananas. That is that 60% of our genes are identical.

And thank you Ken Natton for your remarks. So what this adds up to is that I am a descendent of Charlemagne and Edward III and probably Cleopatra as well as Marc Antony to boot, but so what (?) -everyone else is too.

So next time I meet someone, as I sometimes do, who says they are a direct descendant of John Q. Adams,I suppose I'll just yawn rudely and walk away.
 
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Epictetus said:
So what this adds up to is that I am a descendent of Charlemagne and Edward III and probably Cleopatra as well as Marc Antony to boot, but so what (?) -everyone else is too.
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Exactly.

Epictetus said:
So next time I meet someone, as I sometimes do, who says they are a direct descendant of John Q. Adams,I suppose I'll just yawn rudely and walk away.
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For me, it doesn't actually require an understanding of this little peice of population statistics to recognise that the only valid response to such people is to say 'so what?' Even for people who can trace far more recent ancestory to significant historical figures, it doesn't mean a great deal. It is understandable to take a certain amount of pride in the achievements of your more immediate ancestors. But it says nothing whatever about you as an individual or your place in the society in which you live.
 
For me, it doesn't actually require an understanding of this little piece of population statistics to recognise that the only valid response to such people is to say 'so what?' Even for people who can trace far more recent ancestry to significant historical figures, it doesn't mean a great deal. It is understandable to take a certain amount of pride in the achievements of your more immediate ancestors. But it says nothing whatever about you as an individual or your place in the society in which you live.
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Sorry to quote Christian scripture, I am not a religious man and perhaps you aren't either, but Matthew 3:9 puts it rather well:

"And do not think you can say to yourselves, 'We have Abraham as our father.' I tell you that out of these stones God can raise up children for Abraham." (New International Version ©1984)
 
indianmath said:
I learn from somewhere that humans are evolved forms of some ancient type of monkeys or chimpanzees.:)
regards.
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The correct statement is this - about 6 million years ago, there existed a population [or many interbreeding populations] who thereafter differentiated and evolted into humans and chimps. So, some of the decendants of that population evolved towards what would eventually become modern humans while their kin evolved towards becoming modern chimps - once the two groups became different enough to be unable to mate, the lines of humans and chimps were forever split. This 6 million year old population is the common ancestor between humans and chimps. A similiar common ancesteral population can be found to some point in the past between any two living things on the earth.
 
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