111–120 of 121 posts
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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.
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If it's "very distant" is it really inbreeding?
It's inbreeding by the technical definition/understanding but obviously it's not inbreeding from a practical/biologically concerning standpoint.
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« Non-paternity events » occur at a rate of a few percents a given generation at best, but it's enough that at this scale even a rock-solid documents trail isn't proof of descent.
> « Non-paternity events » occur at a rate of a few percents a given generation at best I thought that widespread genetic testing has shown it to be much higher than that.
Higher rates might be mythical. In any case, it's unclear what the definition should be. See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Non-paternity_event#Rates_of_n...
It's quite fun to imagine doing research on this. You could stand around outside a primary school with a clipboard at the end of the day and ask fathers whether they believe they are the biological parent of the child and fill in a form that looks like this:
[ ] Man with parental responsibity told me to fuck off.
[ ] Man with parental responsibity said: "Look at him, what do you fucking think?"
[ ] Man with parental responsibity told me it was none of my fucking business.
[ ] Man with parental responsibity punched me on the nose.
[ ] Other.
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It's inbreeding by the technical definition/understanding but obviously it's not inbreeding from a practical/biologically concerning standpoint.
In that case we're all inbred, so what does the word mean?
Genealogically, it means a family tree which is not a binary tree [1]. The measure is meaningful over a certain number of generations. Everyone is inbred over infinite generations, assuming a universal common ancestor. That doesn't sap the term of meaning.
Medically, we look at the coefficient of coancestry [2].
Practically, I think we trace back 3 to 4 generations, my source being grandparents (2) is a common word, great grandparents (3) less so but widely understood, and great great grandparents (4) being something few people keep track of.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Binary_tree
[2]https://link.springer.com/referenceworkentry/10.1007/978-1-4...
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…
The genetics of Rome's population at the beginning of the Common Era were almost identical to that of Anatolia's, but just after Antony this began to change significantly due to the migrations that followed the Roman Empire's expansion: https://news.stanford.edu/2019/11/07/genetic-history-rome/
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It's inbreeding by the technical definition/understanding but obviously it's not inbreeding from a practical/biologically concerning standpoint.
In that case we're all inbred, so what does the word mean?
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In that case we're all inbred, so what does the word mean?
The same thing it always meant. Like many things, just because it's a continuum and not binary doesn't mean it's a useless concept.
What next, we can defend "tall" being anywhere from 1mm to 9 feet because height is a continuum?
Words have meaning so they can be used for communication. If I use the word inbred to mean two siblings having a child and two partners sharing an ancestor 20 generations back, I'm not communicating anything when I use the word inbred.
And pointing out that closeness of ancestry is a continuum is not a defense of using that word in that manner.
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My understanding - but I could be wrong - is that the local name of Milan through history only became Milano recently.
The latin name was Mediolanum. Apparently it comes from Celtic Medhelan, in the middle of the plain, and it should be a common name also on the northern side of the Alps (any French person can confirm?). I googled a bit to find when the name switched from Latin to Italian with no success. You could check https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_Milan but I suggest to give a look at the Italian version of the page wit…
That isn't the kind of thing that happens at a particular point in time. It's a process that takes hundreds of years.
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> Is this a world record for proven genealogy? I read somewhere that the British monarchy held the record tracing back to mid-Saxon times. China did not have a dark age and so descent from antiquity is relatively common there. According to https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Family_tree_of_Confucius_in_th... , 80 generations of the family of Confucius have been recorded. What would qualify this as "proven" to you?
It's not proven at all. He takes speculative jumps to close gaps: > My conclusion is that his younger sister, Queen Nana (AD 295–337), married King Mirian III of Caucasian Iberia (AD 290–362). In a footnote he admits that the ancestry of the wife of Mirian III is unknown.
There's no such thing as a proven genealogy extending back so far. Such a proof cannot exist.
But as far as reasonably-well-documented claims go, going back to Saxon times is not even impressive on a worldwide basis.