Adam Rutherford writes You’re Descended from Royalty and So Is Everybody Else – Anybody you can name from ancient history is in your family tree, which I discovered via John Hawks’ new post The surprising connectedness of human genealogies over centuries.
Excerpt:
One way to think of it is to accept that everyone of European descent should have billions of ancestors at a time in the 10th century, but there weren’t billions of people around then, so try to cram them into the number of people that actually were. The math that falls out of that apparent impasse is that all of the billions of lines of ancestry have coalesced into not just a small number of people, but effectively literally everyone who was alive at that time. So, by inference, if Charlemagne was alive in the ninth century, which we know he was, and he left descendants who are alive today, which we also know is true, then he is the ancestor of everyone of European descent alive in Europe today.
Since most of this blog’s posts support academic disciplines looking for answers to the Indo-European question, and gives constantly reasons against modern genetic (and phylogenetic) identification, I think it is worth at least a quick read for anyone interested in the field.
I recently referred to the interesting series of posts by Graham Coop on this matter.
Featured image: Europe around 800 – the map is public domain from from the Historical Atlas (New York, 1911)
Related:
- Genetic vs. genealogical ancestors and actual geographical constraints
- Massive Migrations? The Impact of Recent aDNA Studies on our View of Third Millennium Europe
- The new “Indo-European Corded Ware Theory” of David Anthony
- The renewed ‘Kurgan model’ of Kristian Kristiansen and the Danish school: “The Indo-European Corded Ware Theory”
- Correlation does not mean causation: the damage of the ‘Yamnaya ancestral component’, and the ‘Future America’ hypothesis
- New Ukraine Eneolithic sample from late Sredni Stog, near homeland of the Corded Ware culture
- Germanic–Balto-Slavic and Satem (‘Indo-Slavonic’) dialect revisionism by amateur geneticists, or why R1a lineages *must* have spoken Proto-Indo-European
