Tangled Roots of the Tree of Life
The Medieval Menagerie of Usual Suspects Shared with Millions
If your ancestors are European it's almost certain that Charlemagne is one of your ancestors. No matter where your ancestors are from they probably share a common ancestor with everyone else from that region. What's surprising is that many of those common ancestors lived only 1200 years ago. In Medieval Europe there was a significant amount of intermarriage among royal families. Remote inbreeding occurs when a husband and wife share many ancestors but are not superficially closely related.
It's almost trivial to find connections to the US Presidents if you have ancestors who settled in the British colonies in the 1600s. The amazing thing about genealogy is how closely related everyone is once you start looking. This isn't so amazing to population geneticists. The history of European nobility is well known. Chances are, you have at least one ancestor who connects to the various Dukes, barons, Counts, and Knights and their spouses in medieval times. A large part of the European nobility claims descent from Charlemagne's 20 children.
Given that the average generation is 30 years, that's about 40 generations back to 800. Potentially you have 240 ancestors. That's more than 1 trillion ancestors alive in 800. There weren't even close to one trillion people living then. Maybe only about 25 million. It's not surprising that you are related to many of them.
Equally rare were relationships more distant than 5th -8th cousins. One would have to travel over a thousand miles to find a noble mate, totally unrelated in the families' records. The higher the caste level and wealth, the wider the area available to search for a mate. So perhaps peasants were even more inbred than nobility.
Peasants were confined to an area of a few square kilometers. Most had to pick their mates from just such a small gene pool. If one was a peasant in Anjou, one could not hope for a mate from Tourraine or LaMarche, let alone one from Savoie, Pays Bas, Germany, Russia or England. Chances are most peasants mated with a, say, third cousin or closer. They had no choice other than celibacy. An added problem for peasants is that most did not know who their great-grandparents were, let alone who might be a 3rd cousin.
The Medieval Menagerie of Usual Suspects Shared with Millions
If your ancestors are European it's almost certain that Charlemagne is one of your ancestors. No matter where your ancestors are from they probably share a common ancestor with everyone else from that region. What's surprising is that many of those common ancestors lived only 1200 years ago. In Medieval Europe there was a significant amount of intermarriage among royal families. Remote inbreeding occurs when a husband and wife share many ancestors but are not superficially closely related.
It's almost trivial to find connections to the US Presidents if you have ancestors who settled in the British colonies in the 1600s. The amazing thing about genealogy is how closely related everyone is once you start looking. This isn't so amazing to population geneticists. The history of European nobility is well known. Chances are, you have at least one ancestor who connects to the various Dukes, barons, Counts, and Knights and their spouses in medieval times. A large part of the European nobility claims descent from Charlemagne's 20 children.
Given that the average generation is 30 years, that's about 40 generations back to 800. Potentially you have 240 ancestors. That's more than 1 trillion ancestors alive in 800. There weren't even close to one trillion people living then. Maybe only about 25 million. It's not surprising that you are related to many of them.
Equally rare were relationships more distant than 5th -8th cousins. One would have to travel over a thousand miles to find a noble mate, totally unrelated in the families' records. The higher the caste level and wealth, the wider the area available to search for a mate. So perhaps peasants were even more inbred than nobility.
Peasants were confined to an area of a few square kilometers. Most had to pick their mates from just such a small gene pool. If one was a peasant in Anjou, one could not hope for a mate from Tourraine or LaMarche, let alone one from Savoie, Pays Bas, Germany, Russia or England. Chances are most peasants mated with a, say, third cousin or closer. They had no choice other than celibacy. An added problem for peasants is that most did not know who their great-grandparents were, let alone who might be a 3rd cousin.