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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…
Earlier quoted context omitted.
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 sin…
We have a pretty good sense from that of who did and who didn't get around.
It's surely the case that the vast majority of Japanese on Hokkaido are not descendants of Mark Anthony. On Kyshu, maybe, the Portuguese contributed some genes there.
We can really only be detailed about this with a Y chromosome for a man, or mitochondrial lineage for a woman, and that only covers the case of lineal descent.
Not only can we not determine with confidence who is or isn't a descendent, even given a complete DNA sequence we don't have: most of those descendents won't have any Mark Anthony DNA at all! Chromosomes are more chopped than sifted, if that makes sense, I'm going on memory here, but somewhere around the 12th generation, we start having phantom ancestors: they existed, but left no record in our genes.
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…
One time I got drunk and made out with my second cousin who still lives on that same island. My friends and family who witnessed the course of events were merely amused and not at all disgusted.
Inbreeding ain’t going nowhere in coastal Norway!
My (not at all previously related) wife thinks I’m insane that I love telling this story.
> A descent from antiquity isn’t something most of us can relate to, What? How so? Did we come out of thin air?
Unrelated to the genealogy; but at what point does it become ridiculous to claim yourself a prince? With over a century of no power for the family and no obvious way back to it as the kingdom is well dissolved, it feels like dress-up to style yourself a prince.
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…
Earlier quoted context omitted.
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…
My mother’s parents were from a small island community in Norway. They were second cousins. One time I got drunk and made out with my second cousin who still lives on that same island. My friends and family who witnessed the course of events were merely amused and not at all disgusted. Inbreeding ain’t going nowhere in coastal Norway! My (not at all previously related) wife thinks I’m insane that I love telling this…
Earlier quoted context omitted.
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) https://www.nationalgeographic.org/projects/out-of-eden-walk... !