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From: Ye|land <>
Subject: [CON] Comfirmation of what we have all suspected
Date: Thu, 01 May 2003 08:40:09 -0800


http://www.theatlantic.com/issues/2002/05/olson.htm

The Royal We

The mathematical study of genealogy indicates that everyone in the world
is descended from Nefertiti and Confucius, and everyone of European
ancestry is descended from Muhammad and Charlemagne

by Steve Olson


A few years ago the Genealogical Office in Dublin moved from a back room
of the Heraldic Museum up the street to the National Library. The old
office wasn't big enough for all the people stopping by to track down
their Irish ancestors, and even the new, much larger office is often
crowded. Because of its history of oppression and Catholic fecundity,
Ireland has been a remarkably productive exporter of people. The
population of the island has never exceeded 10 million, but more than 70
million people worldwide claim Irish ancestry. On warm summer days, as
tourists throng nearby Trinity College and Dublin Castle, the line of
visitors waiting to consult one of the office's professional
genealogists can stretch out the door.

I suspect that many people have had a fling with genealogy somewhat like
mine. In my office I have a file containing the scattered lines of
Olsons and Taylors, Richmans and Sigginses (my Irish ancestors), that I
gathered several years ago in a paroxysm of family-mindedness. For the
most part my ancestors were a steady stream of farmers, ministers, and
malcontents. Yet a few of the Old World lines hint at something
grander--they include a couple of knights, and even a baron. I've never
taken the trouble to find out, but I bet with a little work I could
achieve that nirvana of genealogical research, demonstrated descent from
a royal family.

Earlier this year I went to Dublin to learn more about the Irish side of
my family and to talk about genealogy with Mark Humphrys, a young
computer scientist at Dublin City University. Humphrys has dark hair,
deep-blue eyes, heavily freckled arms, and a pasty complexion. He became
interested in genealogy as a teenager, after hearing romantic stories
about his ancestors' roles in rebellions against the English. But when
he tried to trace his family further into the past, the trail ran cold.
The Penal Laws imposed by England in the early eighteenth century
forbade Irish Catholics from buying land or joining professions, which
meant that very few permanent records of their existence were generated.
"Irish people of Catholic descent are almost completely cut off from the
past," Humphrys told me, as we sat in his office overlooking a busy
construction site. (Dublin City University, which specializes in
information technology and the life sciences, is growing as rapidly as
the northern Dublin suburb in which it is located.) "The great irony
about Ireland is that even though we have this long, rich history,
almost no person of Irish-Catholic descent can directly connect to that
history."

While a graduate student at Cambridge University, Humphrys fell in love
with and married an Englishwoman, and investigating her genealogy proved
more fruitful. Her family knew that they were descended from an
illegitimate son of the tenth Earl of Pembroke. After just a couple of
hours in the Cambridge library, Humphrys showed that the Earl of
Pembroke was a direct descendant of Edward III, making Humphrys's wife
the King's great-granddaughter twenty generations removed. Humphrys
began to gather other genealogical tidbits related to English royalty.
Many of the famous Irish rebels he'd learned about in school turned out
to have ancestors who had married into prominent Protestant families,
which meant they were descended from English royalty. The majority of
American presidents were also of royal descent, as were many of the
well-known families of Europe.

Humphrys began to notice something odd. Whenever a reliable family tree
was available, almost anyone of European ancestry turned out to be
descended from English royalty--even such unlikely people as Hermann
Göring and Daniel Boone. Humphrys began to think that such descent was
the rule rather than the exception in the Western world, even if
relatively few people had the documents to demonstrate it.

Humphrys compiled his family genealogies first on paper and then using
computers. He did much of his work on royal genealogies in the
mid-1990s, when the World Wide Web was just coming into general use. He
began to put his findings on Web pages, with hyperlinks connecting
various lines of descent. Suddenly dense networks of ancestry jumped out
at him. "I'd known these descents were interconnected, but I'd never
known how much," he told me. "You can't see the connections reading the
printed genealogies, because it's so hard to jump from tree to tree. The
problem is that genealogies aren't two-dimensional, so any attempt to
put them on paper is more or less doomed from the start. They aren't
three-dimensional, either, or you could make a structure. They have
hundreds of dimensions."

Much of Humphrys's genealogical research now appears on his Web page
Royal Descents of Famous People. Sitting in his office, I asked him to
show me how it works. He clicked on the name Walt Disney. Up popped a
genealogy done by Brigitte Gastel Lloyd (Humphrys links to the work of
others whenever possible) showing the twenty-two generations separating
Disney from Edward I. Humphrys pointed at the screen. "Here we have a
sir, so this woman is the daughter of a knight. Maybe this woman will
marry nobility, but there's a limited pool of nobility, so eventually
someone here is going to marry someone who's just wealthy. Then one of
their children could marry someone who doesn't have that much money. In
ten generations you can easily get from princess to peasant."

T he idea that virtually anyone with a European ancestor descends from
English royalty seems bizarre, but it accords perfectly with some recent
research done by Joseph Chang, a statistician at Yale University. The
mathematics of our ancestry is exceedingly complex, because the number
of our ancestors increases exponentially, not linearly. These numbers
are manageable in the first few generations--two parents, four
grandparents, eight great-grandparents, sixteen
great-great-grandparents--but they quickly spiral out of control. Go
back forty generations, or about a thousand years, and each of us
theoretically has more than a trillion direct ancestors--a figure that
far exceeds the total number of human beings who have ever lived.

In a 1999 paper titled "Recent Common Ancestors of All Present-Day
Individuals," Chang showed how to reconcile the potentially huge number
of our ancestors with the quantities of people who actually lived in the
past. His model is a mathematical proof that relies on such abstractions
as Poisson distributions and Markov chains, but it can readily be
applied to the real world. Under the conditions laid out in his paper,
the most recent common ancestor of every European today (except for
recent immigrants to the Continent) was someone who lived in Europe in
the surprisingly recent past--only about 600 years ago. In other words,
all Europeans alive today have among their ancestors the same man or
woman who lived around 1400. Before that date, according to Chang's
model, the number of ancestors common to all Europeans today increased,
until, about a thousand years ago, a peculiar situation prevailed: 20
percent of the adult Europeans alive in 1000 would turn out to be the
ancestors of no one living today (that is, they had no children or all
their descendants eventually died childless); each of the remaining 80
percent would turn out to be a direct ancestor of every European living
today.

Chang's model incorporates one crucial assumption: random mating in the
part of the world under consideration. For example, every person in
Europe would have to have an equal chance of marrying every other
European of the opposite sex. As Chang acknowledges in his paper, random
mating clearly does not occur in reality; an Englishman is much likelier
to marry a woman from England than a woman from Italy, and a princess is
much likelier to marry a prince than a pauper. These departures from
randomness must push back somewhat the date of Europeans' most recent
common ancestor.

But Humphrys's Web page suggests that over many generations mating
patterns may be much more random than expected. Social mobility accounts
for part of the mixing--what Voltaire called the slippered feet going
down the stairs as the hobnailed boots ascend them. At the same time,
revolutions overturn established orders, countries invade and colonize
other countries, and people sometimes choose mates from far away rather
than from next door. Even the world's most isolated peoples--Pacific
islanders, for example--continually exchange potential mates with
neighboring groups.

This constant churning of people makes it possible to apply Chang's
analysis to the world as a whole. For example, almost everyone in the
New World must be descended from English royalty--even people of
predominantly African or Native American ancestry, because of the long
history of intermarriage in the Americas. Similarly, everyone of
European ancestry must descend from Muhammad. The line of descent for
which records exist is through the daughter of the Emir of Seville, who
is reported to have converted from Islam to Catholicism in about 1200.
But many other, unrecorded descents must also exist.

Chang's model has even more dramatic implications. Because people are
always migrating from continent to continent, networks of descent
quickly interconnect. This means that the most recent common ancestor of
all six billion people on earth today probably lived just a couple of
thousand years ago. And not long before that the majority of the people
on the planet were the direct ancestors of everyone alive today.
Confucius, Nefertiti, and just about any other ancient historical figure
who was even moderately prolific must today be counted among everyone's
ancestors.

Toward the end of our conversation Humphrys pointed out something I
hadn't considered. The same process works going forward in time; in
essence every one of us who has children and whose line does not go
extinct is suspended at the center of an immense genetic hourglass. Just
as we are descended from most of the people alive on the planet a few
thousand years ago, several thousand years hence each of us will be an
ancestor of the entire human race--or of no one at all.

The dense interconnectedness of the human family might seem to take some
of the thrill out of genealogical research. Sure, I was able to show in
the Genealogical Office that my Siggins ancestors are descended from the
fourteenth-century Syggens of County Wexford; but I'm also descended
from most of the other people who lived in Ireland in the fourteenth
century. Humphrys took issue with my disillusionment. It's true that
everyone's roots go back to the same family tree, he said. But each path
to our common past is different, and reconstructing that path, using
whatever records are available, is its own reward. "You can ask whether
everyone in the Western world is descended from Charlemagne, and the
answer is yes, we're all descended from Charlemagne. But can you prove
it? That's the game of genealogy."

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