Is Everyone a Descendant of Royalty?

today I'm going to answer the question are all Europeans descendants of Charlemagne and when I say Europe in we could actually expand that to include anyone with at least one European ancestor so that would include most people in the Western world even people of color because usually there's at least one European somewhere in everyone's family tree but the principles we're going to talk about in this video do not just apply to Europe anyway we could change the question - are all Asians descendants of the Tong dynasty or are all Middle Easterners descendants of the caliphs of Baghdad so what we're really asking is whether or not every person living today is somehow related to medieval royalty but for the sake of simplicity I'm going to use Charlemagne and Europeans as an example [Music] [Music] so I'm not going to keep you in suspense the answer according to one theory is yes everyone alive today with at least one drop of European blood is a descendent of the Great King Charlemagne and the reason I'm bringing this whole issue up is because some people like to brag about the fact that they are a distant relative of some king or queen and what they don't realize is the fact that the same is true for just about everyone else now why have I chosen to focus on Charlemagne well Charlemagne is kind of the father of Europe he lived around the Year 800 Andry established an empire in Western Europe for the first time since the fall of Rome his empire eventually evolved into the countries we now know today as France and Germany so every royal house in medieval and modern Europe can somehow trace their roots back to Charlemagne that's why he's at the top of my european royal family tree chart if you can connect to any person on this tree you can also connect to Charlemagne so the theory that I'm going to talk about in this video is based on a paper by a Yale mathematician named Joseph Chang his theory went on to be tested by several other experts including some geneticists and genealogists and the overall conclusion was that the theory seems to hold up if you're interested in reading all of the technical details from the original sources I'll put a bunch of links to those in the description so the theory doesn't really have a name but I'm going to call it the identical ancestors theory and in order to explain it to you I'm going to go through three genealogical principles that when taken together result in the identical ancestors theory so principle number one is as you go back in time your number of ancestors increases exponentially so here is a very basic family tree here's you and here are your immediate ancestors if you go back one generation you have exactly two ancestors your biological father and your biological mother if you go back another generation you have four ancestors your paternal grandparents and your maternal grandparents if we keep going up you have eight great-grandparents 16 great-great grandparents 32 great-great-great grandparents and so on so at first glance it appears as though the math is fairly simple you start with two and then you just double the number for every generation after that so let's say we go back 10 generations that would be 1,024 ancestors if we go back 20 generations that number jumps to over a million you can see that the numbers start off small but get really big really fast now let's talk about generation lengths for a second there are lots of different estimates when it comes to the average number of years between each generation but I'm gonna go with 30 years which is a nice round number and is close to what most genealogists would suggest so 20 generations would be 600 years but instead of counting the years up let's count them down from the year 2000 so this is the year this is the generation number and this is the number of ancestors we should expect to find at that point so far we've gone 20 generations let's go some more by the time we get to 40 generations which is when Charlemagne was around our number has gone up to well over one-trillion ancestors by now I hope you see that there's a problem you see the population of the entire world in the year 800 was only around 250 million people so how can we have one trillion ancestors when there were only 250 million people well we can't which leads me to the second principle principle number two is as your family tree gets larger you're going to start finding that the same people appear on different branches of your tree now the word that usually pops into people's mind at this point is inbreeding or perhaps even incest but these words are not actually appropriate for what I'm talking about inbreeding an incest involved mating between very close relatives an example of this would be philip ii of spain from the house of habsburg who married his sister's daughter his niece and with her had a son who became Philip 1/3 Philip 1/3 then married a close cousin and then their son married a close cousin and so forth that's inbreeding and not only is it gross it's unhealthy but that's not what I'm talking about here what I'm talking about involves relatives that are a little more distant for example if you discover the name of a great-great great-grandfather on your father's side of the family and then discover that the same name also appears as a great-great great-grandfather on your mother's side of the family that means that your parents are third cousins and there's a big difference between an uncle nice marriage and a third cousin marriage and uncle and anis share a whopping 25% of their DNA in common in contrast third cousins share less than 1% which is very close to being statistically irrelevant most people will be hard pressed to name one or two of their second cousins let alone a third cousin so what this all means is that when calculating our number of ancestors we cannot simply multiply two by two by two and so forth we have to take into account the fact that throughout most of history most people married a second third or fourth cousin this is because most families lived in the same small village for generations and therefore everybody was related to everybody somehow I should also mention that first cousin marriages were generally not the norm but they certainly weren't uncommon so what genealogists have found is that as a family tree grows its width gets bigger and bigger but then at some point it stops and then it actually gets smaller and smaller so let's recap what we've learned so far after hearing about principle number one you may have thought wow those numbers really add up fast therefore it's really easy to imagine that everyone must be related but when you heard about principle number two you may have thought oh well if most people marry distant cousins from their own village the chances of two people from opposite sides of a continent being related must be very low but there's still one more principle to discuss principle number three is the six degrees of separation principle this principle is sometimes associated with the actor Kevin Bacon there's a game you can play in which someone names an actor and the other person has to get back to Kevin Bacon in six steps or less so for example let's take the actor Charlie Chapman Charlie Chapman was in a movie called the Great Dictator with Don Brody Don Brody was in a movie called Murphy's Law with David Heyman and David Heyman was in a movie called where the truth lies with Kevin Bacon so you can get from Charlie Chapman to Kevin Bacon in only three steps according to these six degrees of separation principle you should be able to make a connection between any two people living on earth in six steps or less several studies using social media sites like Facebook or LinkedIn have provided evidence that in most cases this principle is in fact true now the reason why this principle works is not because everyone has lots of connections to all sorts of different people no most people have only a limited number of connections however everyone can usually get to a super well-connected person in one or two steps and once you connect to a super well-connected person you can then make giant leaps from one small network here to another small network over there so when it comes to genealogy even if most people stayed within their own small village and married within their own small village there were always a few people that didn't there were people who move to the next town and still others who journeyed really far away factoring war armies and all the nasty stuff that goes along with it you'll see that it doesn't take long for genetic connections to be made all across a continent we can apply this same principle to royal families you may think that since royal families in the past only ever married within the nobility there was no possibility that royal blood could have trickled down to the level of the common people but Kings often had many children the older legitimate ones tended to marry really well but the younger legitimate ones as well as the many illegitimate ones often married lesser nobles and then their children married even lesser nobles and so on and so on it was not uncommon for a line to go all the way from Prince to popper in just a few generations okay so we know that our number of ancestors goes up exponentially even if due to cousin marriages we're not actually doubling it every generation we also know that even though most people married someone who lived nearby and who belonged to the same social class there have always been people who traveled far and wide and people who produce children with someone richer or poorer than themselves so when we take all of these things into consideration make some models and use some fancy math what conclusions can we reach once again I'll remind you to check the links in the description if you want all the nitty-gritty details but basically here's the conclusion for the continent of Europe you only have to go back 1,000 years to reach what is called the identical ancestors point the identical ancestors point is the point in which every person of European descent has exactly the same set of ancestors so if we were to go back to the Year 1000 and remove the 20% of people who didn't have any children or whose lines died out completely after just a few generations the remaining 80% are the common ancestors of every person of European descent living today let me put this in a few different ways so you can really grasp it this is Jane Jane lives in London in 2019 all of these people living in Europe 1,000 years ago that 80% we just talked about are her ancestors she's a descendant of every single one of them if we had perfect genealogical records she'd be able to trace a direct line back to any one of them we choose so she could trace her line to the king of England the King of France or the king of Hungary but she could also trace her line to some simple farmer in Ireland a lowly foot soldier in Poland or the guy who swept floors of some church in Rome and the same is true for Elsa from stalk Vlad from Moscow and even me Matt Baker from Vancouver Canada so if we're talking about you assuming you have at least one European ancestor and Charlemagne who lived even longer than one thousand years ago then yes you are probably a descendant of him even if you don't know the link and again if you have no European ancestors don't worry if you're Asian chances are that you're related to royalty - I'm not going to say to Genghis Khan because he lived less than 1000 years ago but let's go with the great Chinese emperor dezong of Tong you're probably a descendant of him and if you're from some other part of the world you're likely related to some famous person from that region somehow and the farther back in time we go we can actually find an identical ancestor point not just for a single continent but for an even larger chunk of the world so for example the Prophet Muhammad lived about 1400 years ago and is therefore likely the ancestor of every person now living in Europe the Middle East India Southeast Asia North America etc and if we go back even further to let's say Ramses the great from Egypt who lived over 3,000 years ago he's probably the common ancestor of every single person on earth the only people who might not link in would be people from some very isolated tribes somewhere but they're likely not watching this video anyway now is this theory rock-solid no there's no way to prove it 100% and in fact the genetic studies based on Europe do show some variation for example people living in Spain and Italy are a little less likely to be easily connected to everyone else within just 1,000 years perhaps that's because there are mountains between those regions and the rest of Europe on the other hand you can likely find a connection between all the people in France and Germany in less than 1,000 years because those two countries are so close to each other and have had lots of interaction so there you have it according to the identical ancestors theory we as Hugh are all connected one way or another and it's very likely that you don't have to go back as far as you might think to discover that connection if you're interested in finding out exactly how you might be related to royalty stay tuned for next week's video which will cover the topic finding your royal roots thanks for watching

Channel: UsefulCharts

Views: 1,243,533

Keywords: identical ancestors point, joseph chang, is everyone related to royalty, genghis khan descendants, charlemagne descendants, am i related to royalty, am i related to someone famous, universal ancestry, how many ancestors do you have

Id: 15Uce4fG4R0

Length: 14min 49sec (889 seconds)

Published: Fri Apr 12 2019

Reddit Comments

[u/_Neoshade_]

From /u/jurble below:
It's called pedigree collapse. Basically it works out to anyone far enough back with known descendants is likely somewhere in someone's family tree because ancestors increase at 2^x but there's less and less people the further back you go in time.

Eventually you reach a point where every single living human in an area in a time period is in someone's family tree. The video description links to the math papers.

[u/omanomanoman]

Breakfast club need to answer some questions

[u/[deleted]]

I have never heard of any white person saying they are descendents of Charlemagne, let alone even knowing exactly who he is..

[u/lurker4lyfe6969]

The rapper?

[u/EDI-Thor]

No.

[u/bmacc]

Ok but is that Charlie Leduff in the thumbnail?

[u/skyesdow]

Did Charlemagne work at an ancient fertility clinic?

[u/blue_strat]

Presumably Charlemagne is a good example because it's well-documented that his family continued for a long time. Picking a random person, or a king with few children, has a higher chance of getting that 20% of people who were alive but didn't continue into the gene pool present today.