In 2016, the British tabloids were abuzz with
the news that one of the country’s biggest celebrities, the cheeky, rakish, gallivanting
cockney called Danny Dyer, was related to royalty. How could this be, Danny grew up on the mean
streets of East London and speaks the argot of a true working class “geezer.” Well, we might all be surprised where our
genealogy – family history – leads to. In 2015, a man from Maryland, USA, claimed
he was the rightful King of the Isle of Man – located in the Irish Sea between England
and Scotland. This revelation came after he was contacted
by a genealogist who told him the throne was his. The Queen wasn’t keen on the idea. Today we will do a bit of digging and find
out if you could have noble blood running through your veins, in this episode of the
Infographics Show, Are YOU related to royalty? As you’ll know from our show on names, surnames
originated in a complex manner and it differs from country to country. If we take England in the Middle Ages, people
were often given surnames based on what they did as an occupation, where they came from,
or simply whose son they were. Smith was of course from “blacksmith”
and Williams was the “son of William.” The Romans were keen on having surnames, but
other European cultures were not. Certain surnames were also unusual. Researchers at the University of California
and the London School of Economics actually looked into some unusual surnames to see which
ones often had aristocrat connections. The surnames Atthill, Bunduck, Balfour, Bramston,
Cheslyn, and Conyngham were all said to be linked with nobility, more so than other last
names. Indeed, they found that there was a corollary
between certain names and wealth. But what does it mean if your name is Smith? Well, imagine all the royals of Britain over
the centuries and how many kids they had, including the many bastards born in the Middle
Ages. That’s a lot, says one genealogy website,
stating that “practically everyone alive with British ancestry will have a connection”
with a king.” Can that be true. One website called Royal Family Tree let’s
you search your surname and brings up a bunch of royals and landed gentry sharing that name. The name we used, one of our writers, is shared
with some of these aristocratic persons. In fact, if you’ve got a British surname
– there are plenty of those all over the world – one research agency cited in the
Huffington Post in 2011 said there’s a good chance you are related to nobility or royalty. If you live in the UK, it said there is a
20 percent chance. In fact, thousands of people who posted their
family tree on the website MyHeritage had King George III somewhere in that tree. Any number of these families could be related
to you, never mind if you are in the UK, US or somewhere else. You shouldn’t get too excited though, as
Gizmodo wrote in 2015. Having royal blood might not be as special
as you think. Let’s just forget about names and think
about bloodline. People can test their DNA these days, and
if they do they might be surprised to find they come from royalty. How is this? In an article in The Guardian in 2015 geneticist
Adam Rutherford explained that if you are of European extraction, which means a hell
of a lot of you watching this show, then you are related by blood to the famous King Charlemagne. He had 18 kids with lots of women during his
lifetime from 742 to 814. You see, you know you have two parents, and
you know you have four grandparents. They had parents and grandparents, too. If you kept adding that up by the time you
went back a thousand years you would have had more relations than people were alive
back then. What this means, explain genealogists, is
that the further you go back the smaller the web is. Rutherford explained, “Basically, everyone
alive in the ninth century who left descendants is the ancestor of every living European today.” He says, if you are white you have a bit of
everything in you, meaning you’ll be part Viking, part Celt, part Anglo-Saxon, etc. Now we can take this a little further. How related to you is another person watching
this video at the same time? The answer is you are related because we all
share common ancestors. In fact, it’s said that everyone alive on
the planet today will have a common ancestor that lived around 2000 years ago. We are all inbred to some extent. The question is, can we find out who are common
ancestor is? This question is a subject that is studied,
called the Most Recent Common Ancestor, or MRCA. Is there a single person from the past that
can be connected to everyone alive today? Was there one little group of the first humans
that led to the explosion of mankind. In the bible that could be said to be Adam
and Eve and their kids Cain, Able, and Seth. It’s thought they had daughters, too, and
perhaps incestually they had children of their own. The bible is a bit sketchy here. According to Bible.org there was indeed incest,
but it was ok because Adam and Eve were created by the hand of God. Anyway, let’s now move back to the scientific
point of view. Did we all come from a small group of people? It seems so. We can trace our DNA back to one single female,
she’s called the first matrilineal ancestor or the Mitochondrial Eve and is thought to
have existed around 200,000 years ago, or thereabouts. At 10,000 years we have something called the
identical ancestor point, which means anyone alive back then is the ancestor of everyone
alive today. One scientist writing on Quora states, “Everyone
alive today has at least one single ancestor in common with everyone else on Earth, and
that person may have lived 200 - 300 generations ago.” That means, said the writer, that if that
ancestor were to come back to life to have a big family reunion, we would all have to
attend. We could even accept that we are all made
of stars as all elements were formed at the heart of a star. The brilliant Carl Sagan once famously said,
“We are a way for the universe to know itself. Some part of our being knows this is where
we came from. We long to return. And we can, because the cosmos is also within
us. We're made of star stuff.” So, now you know. We are all related, and indeed, we share some
royal DNA. But what does that matter? It’s nice to know we all basically came
from the same place and in some sense, are connected. Have you ever tried to trace your ancestry? What did you find out? Let us know in the comments! Also, be sure to check out our other video
called This is How You Will Die! Thanks for watching, and, as always, don’t
forget to like, share, and subscribe. See you next time!
