81–90 of 121 posts
Such paper lineages assume that none of the fathers were cuckolded. DNA is the only way to be sure.
At the same time, testing was also not possible back then.
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.
Is Marc Anthony a descendent of Mark Antony?
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…
It's "Mark Antony". Spell check!
I knew my great grandparents until their death when I was 18. My great great great grandparents would potentially view me as “their” descendants but I wonder how much further. Going back 8 or 10 generations means there are so many descendants (thousands?) that the relationship is meaningless.
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…
Earlier quoted context omitted.
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…
All of which is true, but Mark Anthony gets us well into the historical period. 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…
My main point is that its becoming clear that many supposedly very isolated populations have in fact had gene mixture with outside groups in the not distant past and that there were large pre-modern migrations and mixing events.