Isn't the actual name Marcus Antonius? I wonder why we use the anglicised version for him, but the latin names for most other Romans
Maybe for the same reason the names of famous cities (especially if already famous in the past) are translated into foreign languages. Examples. Roma is Rome in English and Milano is Milan. London is Londra in Italian but Manchester is Manchester and Liverpool is Liverpool. Livorno (a small Italian town where English poets liked to spend their time) is Leghorn. Aachen (a German city that used to be the residence of C…
Does it follow that same would apply for all humans of Mark Antony's time?
Kinda! This is covered in Randall Munroe's (of XKCD fame) latest book - What If 2; chapter 33 "Ancestor Fraction" Obviously a human who did not have any children cannot be the ancestor of anyone - this includes the circa 50% of humans who died during infancy, and the 25% of adult humans who did not have children. Also, for some people who had children the line will die-out; if you have four children all of whom die i…
Does this take into account geographical limitations? I don't know about today, but if you applied the same analysis to the global population of 1600, it seems impossible on geographical grounds for either Mark Anthony or one of his contemporaries in South America to be an ancestor of everyone alive in 1600.
> An unbroken lineage to people of ancient times, known as a descent from antiquity, still remains to be historically proven. Such records exist in Chinese culture, in particular in Taiwan and the diaspora, as they have not been interrupted before the Cultural Revolution.
Even then it depends on what you’d call antiquity. Chinese records only go back as far as 220 BCE, and with a lot of gaps in between.
If the average age of giving birth is 25, Mark Antony would be about 80 generations ago. With each generation back doubling the number of ancestors (2 parents, 4 grandparents, …), this person has a theoretical 2^80 ancestors - somewhat more than the number of people that have ever lived. So clearly that logic is flawed, and the family tree must in fact be a family web - but potentially a very, very wide one. I wouldn…
This is the correct answer. The entire population of Europe is about as descended from Mark Antony as that Georgian noble house. Only the Y-chromosome is lineally passed across such long time spans
>Only the Y-chromosome is lineally passed across such long time spans
There's also the mitochondrial DNA passed along female descandants.
Does it follow that same would apply for all humans of Mark Antony's time?
Kinda! This is covered in Randall Munroe's (of XKCD fame) latest book - What If 2; chapter 33 "Ancestor Fraction" Obviously a human who did not have any children cannot be the ancestor of anyone - this includes the circa 50% of humans who died during infancy, and the 25% of adult humans who did not have children. Also, for some people who had children the line will die-out; if you have four children all of whom die i…
You’re assuming much more “cross-polination” than actually happened.
Humans didn’t use to mix geographically (hence different races).
And there’s isolated subgroups that didn’t mix or mixed much less (e.g. Jews in Europe)
> An unbroken lineage to people of ancient times, known as a descent from antiquity, still remains to be historically proven. Such records exist in Chinese culture, in particular in Taiwan and the diaspora, as they have not been interrupted before the Cultural Revolution.
Even then it depends on what you’d call antiquity. Chinese records only go back as far as 220 BCE, and with a lot of gaps in between.
And yet there are people who can trace their lineage back to Confucious (c.551 – c.479 BCE)
Plot twist at the end there, as the author of the article is themselves a prince of the family of living descendants of Mark Anthony. Although he's pretty humble about it before breaking the news it did make me double take. To me the amazing thing is that they managed to hold on to both power and money for so long. It took 1800 years for them to lose power, and 200 years later they're still sending their princes to P…
If the average age of giving birth is 25, Mark Antony would be about 80 generations ago. With each generation back doubling the number of ancestors (2 parents, 4 grandparents, …), this person has a theoretical 2^80 ancestors - somewhat more than the number of people that have ever lived. So clearly that logic is flawed, and the family tree must in fact be a family web - but potentially a very, very wide one. I wouldn…
There also wasn't much mixing of isolated populations of humans, leading to a relatively large amount of inbreeding. Sort of like a graph with clusters of heavily linked nodes and only a few links between the clusters. https://www.newscientist.com/article/mg22029453-500-inbreedi... > "“In the distant past, human populations were probably only in the thousands or at best tens of thousands, and lived locally, exchangin…
We have pretty good evidence since 2013 of bands of neolithic humans moving over really tremendous distances. There's good evidence in the Americas of people moving from the Great Lakes down to the Gulf and beyond. Once horses were domesticated in Eurasia, all bets are off and we see mass migration from the steppe through to all of Europe, India, Iran, the Horn of Africa, and other places. This didn't happen in a single life time, but people on horseback with carts really got around.