Our Shared Ancestors
Contents
- Introduction
- Background
- A common family tree
- Misconceptions cleared up
- A brief discussion of genetics
- Conclusion
- References
- Bibliography
- Useful links and further reading
Introduction
From the wealth of fascinating discoveries presented on BBC's Who Do You Think You Are?, the one that seems to be retained most in the public memory was Danny Dyer’s discovery in Season 13—that he is a direct descendant of King Edward III.Can I just have a moment to myself? A kid from Canning Town ... and this is my bloodline. - Danny Dyer discovering his 22x great-grandfather, Edward III
It's really not hard to see why this episode, along with the other episodes which trace celebrities' royal ancestry, make such splashes and the headlines, they really are fascinating! Especially for Danny Dyer, who takes pride in his working class background, and Cockney accent, the fact that someone of [his] stature, as he put it, could be descended from royalty, just doesn't seem to compute!
Background
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| Danny Dyer's descent from Edward III (click to enlarge) Researched and designed by: The Time Detectives |
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This statement at first probably seems quite surprising, and it often elicits quizzical looks when people first read or learn about this. The astute may query why we are choosing royalty as the tip of the tree here, after all, don't most of us have only commoner ancestry? Most, if asked prior to learning what is presented in this article, would flatly say that we have no royal ancestry at all! How can it be that all of us have royal ancestry that we are unaware of, and why focus on them? As we will see, the selection of royalty as the apex of this common tree is not entirely arbitrary, and quite useful.
A common family tree
Mark Humphrys, Assistant Professor of Computing at Dublin City University, a Computer Scientist and accomplished genealogist, has written "Royal Descents are not as unusual as you might think. [...] There is basically a single vast Western family tree, from which millions of people are provably descended."[1]
What Humphrys means in referring to the Western family tree, is a project to put as many people in the Western world on one single family tree. Many genealogists, professional and accomplished amateurs, are and have been involved in this[2][3], particularly those who are interested and work on early modern and medieval genealogy. Humphrys himself on his website, (Humphrys genealogy), has a page dedicated to tracing and presenting the descents of various famous people from medieval royalty. This means that everyone on his list are all mutually related to each other: from Matt Damon, to Julia Styles, to Obama, to Hugh Grant! (See the bottom of the page for links to other such "Western family tree" projects, compiled and researched by professionals.)
Why a Western family tree, and not a World family tree? We call it a Western family tree because the West, specifically the USA, Canada, Scotland, England, France, and some other countries, have the best preserved records for genealogy - Scotland and England having some of the best record collections for genealogy in the entire world[4], with at least some branches of the average person with roots in those contries being able to trace back to the 17th century or late 16th century. Simply, we do have an ability to put millions of Westerners and their descendants in one family tree, with every single generation proven genealogically, whereas unfortunately, other areas in the world do not have the records to facilitate such a project, sometimes due to the colonial destruction of records.
A large proportion of Westerners and Western diaspora really can be put on one family tree and see their mutual common ancestors, and exactly how they are related to every other person in the tree, whereas at the moment, the World family tree and the common ancestors of the entire world stay in the remit of statistics, mathematics, and population studies.
How many of us are in the "common tree"?
The number of people who can proveably, genealogically trace their lineage back to medieval royalty is vast— already there are millions of people who have proven, to professional standards that they are descendants of medieval royalty, and estimates of the total number of people that could prove this are in the tens, if not hundreds of millions, at the very least.[5]
To demonstrate how this is possible, we can follow a simple mathematical argument: each of us has 2 parents, 4 grandparents, 8 great-grandparents, and so on. If we consider a generational gap of 30 years, by the time of the Norman Conquest, each of us would theoretically have 4.3 billion ancestors. And if we stretch back a little further, to the time of Charlemagne’s coronation in 800 CE, that number balloons to over two trillion—around twenty times more than the total number of humans who have ever lived!
This mind-boggling calculation brings us to two key conclusions: 1) As we go further back in time, we must descend from the same people in our family tree many, many times over, and 2) as we continue on that journey back, we will first reach a point where we share lots of common ancestors with everyone, and then eventually we will all share the exact same ancestors.[6] This point in history is known as the Identical Ancestors Point.
The fact that we are all related and share all the same ancestors, when you think about it, is actually fairly trivial, we have known this for hundreds of years. What the really interesting and surprising fact is, is just how quickly we reach that point, even on a global scale.[7]
Terms defined and explanatory examples
This topic often causes confusion as it can get quite complex, especially when trying to explain it, so let's have a quick look at some terms:
- A common ancestor is some ancestor that is mutual to you and someone else, or to a group of people. The group could be of any size; two people, a household, a population, or even the entire world! Therefore the "Common Ancestry Point" (CAP) of a population is the rough time period at which said population will start to share common ancestors mutual to all, or almost all of them.
- The Identical Ancestors Point (IAP), also regularly referred to as the All Ancestors Point (AAP) is the point at which a population will share all their ancestors, no matter who they are. This point will be at some time period before the Common Ancestry Point.
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| A very simplified image demonstrating the CAP vs. IAP (arrows signify descent) |
Of course, this principle of CAP, IAP and Common Descent is not at all exclusive to the British, Irish, Western or any one single population for that matter, it is a fact of genealogy and populations, but as discussed before, the West is the best area to use as an example, because the records exist to show the example on paper, and actually prove through genealogy. PROBABILITY and PROVABILITY.
Why Royalty?
We have seen thus why choosing the West as our area for our examples makes sense, now we can tackle the next question, why do we choose royalty as our apex?
Again, this question has a simple answer. Go back to the 14th century, and what class of society had written about them the records required to establish concrete genealogical relationships? - The Gentry, Nobility, and Royalty. There just is no other class of people who we can trace genealogical descent from spanning centuries other than royalty.
And thus we choose Western royalty, most of whom by the late 1100s at the very latest, descended from Charlemagne, the first Emperor crowned in the West since Romulus Augustulus, at the fall of the Western Roman Empire, at Christmas, 800 C.E., as the apex of our ginormous Western family tree. This makes the most sense. That is why Charlemagne is so often used as the poster boy of European Common Descent in news articles and even academic papers that study the subject, because he is the man that it makes most sense to centre our tree on.[8][9] Charlemagne is really the only person from the 8th Century that a person living today can trace a 100% proven direct descent from.
Misconceptions cleared up
We now come to four of the most frequent misconceptions and arguments that I encounter with people online and in person:
1) The first big misconception people often have, is when they see headlines like "We all descend from Edward III / Charlemagne / [insert historical person here]", they retort, "what about everybody else living at that time?"
The answer to that question is, as we have seen before, is that we do descend from others (or all) of the other people who left descendants at that time, it is not that we only descend from Edward III, or Charlemagne, or anybody else that we hand-pick. However, we will never know who those others ancestors are, or details about their names and lives, or be able to prove genealogically a line of descent from them, because the records do not exist, they have not made a mark on history.
2) The second largest misconception I see is people thinking that because we today all descend from medieval royalty in some way, that this implies all their ancestors must descend from royalty, which they reject. In fact, this is a non-sequitur, it does not follow from the premise.
An agricultural labourer in the year 1550 is highly, highly unlikely to be a descendant of medieval royalty, but a wealthy merchant, perhaps a younger son of a gentryman, would be. And as we also saw earlier, we all have so many ancestors from the year 1550, that the chances of not having someone in our ancestry in the year 1550 who was from the upper echelons of society, and descended from medieval royalty, is also highly, highly unlikely. [See Andrew Millard's calculations.]
In American ancestry circles, you will see that a person with a proven royal descent, typically a European who migrated to the New World, who has descendants today, are called Gateway Ancestors, in that they provide a "gateway" to royalty. (It is a slightly hard term to define strictly, as wouldn't their children, grandchildren, etc., all be Gateway Ancestors, too?) But the term has gained a wider usage and definition in genealogy as a whole, just meaning any one person, usually in the early modern period, who has a proven descent from royalty and proven modern descendants. This provides a good backdrop for a logical statement:
Almost everyone has one or more gateway ancestors, but not every ancestor is a gateway ancestor.
3) As we have seen earlier, millions of people have already proven, to professional standards, that they are descendants of royalty, including commoners. My "Royal Descent of Thomas Graves of Thurcaston" series on this blog is an ongoing series showing how one man, listed as an Agricultural Labourer on the 1841 Census, is a descendant of royalty! That one man has hundreds of descendants, and his story is repeated across England and Scotland. Thus maybe even hundreds of millions of people could prove a descent from medieval royalty.
However, and here is the misconception, this does not mean that the search for, and proving such a connection is easy, or simple. People who find royal descents, especially from "commoners", can take years to actually find and prove their descent conclusively. It took the aforementioned Mark Humphrys almost 40 years to prove his descent, as it comes through Ireland!
So, although in reality we all will have a royal descent, and certainly a high proportion of us have, could, can or will prove it, it is certainly not a simple or fast journey. And unfortunately, the records required to prove a royal descent may simply not exist for some people, forever leaving them out from connecting to the Western family tree.
4) Another common argument against recent common ancestry is that every time cousins or close relatives were to marry, this would reduce the total number of ancestors that a person has, and because people did not travel so much and stayed in their local area, this also reduces the "ancestral pool" of people we descend from.
This deserves, and I will give at some point, an entire post of its own, but here we can link to a bit of research done by Dr Andrew Millard, Associate Professor of Archaeology at Durham University, who wrote an article based on primary research in academic literature on the subject. It can be accessed on the Wayback Machine here: https://web.archive.org/web/20140119231934/community.dur.ac.uk/a.r.millard/genealogy/EdwardIIIDescent.php.
His article asks the question, how many descendants of Edward III are there? In his calculations, he takes into account close and more distant cousin marriages, and their impact on the number of ancestors a person will have in the past. The whole article is very much worth a read and full of references and input by other people involved in this area of research (Mark Humphrys and Adam Rutherford, the esteemed geneticist), but Millard's conclusion in his article was this:
[T]here is an extremely high probabilty that a modern English person with predominantly English ancestry descends from Edward III, at a very minimum over 99%, and more likely very close to 100%. The number of descendants of Edward III must therefore include nearly all of the population of England, and probably much of the populations of the rest of the UK and Eire, as well as many millions in the USA, former British colonies and Europe, so 100 million seems a conservative estimate. Documenting one's own descent from Edward III is, however, another matter!
This page and research came to light again at the beginning of 2024, when Adam Rutherford appeared on BBC Radio 4, talking about royal ancestry. Andrew Millard retweeted Adam Rutherford's tweet here, stating how conservative he had been in his calculations to come to his conclusion - 46 orders of magnitude more conservative and still the same conclusion. [Italics added] - From here.
The historian Ian Mortimer, in Appendix 8 of his opus, The Perfect King: The Life of Edward III, performs similarly conservative calculations, and comes to the same conclusion, that Edward III is likely to be the last king (at the moment) to be a common ancestor of the entire English population [and I add Scottish, Welsh, Northern Irish and Irish to that as well].
Regardless of more common cousin marriages and less movement of people, it would take an astounding case of isolation for someone not to be descended from Edward III. Millard, as I, also points out though, proving said descent through documentation is another thing entirely!
Brian Pears, in his article The Ancestor Paradox Revisited shows that even if in every single generation, there was a union between second cousins (as he says, an impossible scenario), that by generation 29 we would still be reaching the maximum number of possible unique ancestors. In following a less extreme and more realistic case, he also concludes that around 20 generations or so is where we reach the point where a large proportion of the population are our ancestors.
So, while all Britons share descent from Edward III, this concept extends far beyond the British Isles. As we have seen, it applies to Europe as a whole, and the underlying principles are universal to any population of any size, anywhere. Adam Rutherford and others, using primary research and the same principles as Millard, have demonstrated that every European, along with individuals of recent European ancestry, are descendants of Charlemagne—alongside nearly all of his contemporaries who left surviving progeny. Taking it a step further, the Most Recent Common Ancestor (MRCA) of all humanity may have lived as recently as the time of Julius Caesar, likely in North or Southeast Asia, according to research by Rhode in 2003. Even in cases of extreme isolation, computer simulations along with our mathematical calculations, show that the MRCA's date does not extend much further into the past than that.
A brief discussion of genetics
Now would be a good time to turn to a brief discussion of genetics, a field that is often almost mythologised by the press, and by people who have taken a DNA test.
Y-chromosomal Adam and Mitochondrial Eve
When most people hear or read about "common ancestors", it is with respect to the so-called Y-Chromosomal Adam, and Mitochondrial Eve. These two are the most recent common ancestors of all humans today whom we all descend from in the direct patrilineal (for the Y-chromosome) and direct matrilineal (for the mt-DNA) lines.
I.e., Y-chromosomal Adam is the most recent man whom all humans descend from in the father to son line (direct patriline), and Mitochondiral Eve is the most recent woman whom all humans descend from in the direct mother to daughter line (direct matriline). These two did not have to be a couple, nor even had to live at the same time.
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| Patriline and Matriline From DNA-explained blog - here |
Genetic common ancestors vs. genealogical common ancestors
This often skews peoples' notions of how close our common ancestors to others actually are. Genetic Common Ancestors will always be further away than Genealogical Common Ancestors for whole populations, as we do not receive DNA from all of our ancestors.[10]
It is a curious fact that there are some humans who will be ancestors to the entire human race, yet not a single one of us will have any of their genes - they are a genealogical ancestor to every human alive, yet a genetic ancestor to nobody alive.
We can explain this with the following little thought experiment. Of course, this (probably) did not happen, but it is a good teaching example:
Imagine a soldier from Macedonia in the retinue of Alexander the Great, and he has followed Alexander all the way to India. He peels off from the army, tired of fighting, and is accepted into a local tribe in India, within which he finds a partner, and they have children. His children are thus half Macedonian and half Indian. His children in turn find a partner within that tribe, and their children in turn are ~ a quarter Macedonian and three quarters Indian, and so on and so forth, down to the present day. By today, that one Macedonian soldier would be the ancestor of likely the entire Indian (or Asian as a whole) populace, yet because of the lack of continual influx of "Macedonian" genes, and overwhelming presence of "Indian" genes, the soldier's genes may have been completely flushed out of the population.
Therefore, that soldier, despite being an ancestor to the entire population, is a genetic ancestor to no-one in that population.
Genetics, in terms of what we receive and from whom, is pretty much a game of chance. And even though we may not share any genes with a given ancestor or relative, they are still very much our ancestor, and relative.
The IAP and genetics
This concept also helps explain why, despite sharing the same distant ancestors, humans still exhibit diverse physical traits and genetic differences across populations. The key lies in the proportion of ancestry from our home regions. While c. 3,000 years ago, we all have ancestors scattered around the globe, the largest proportion of our ancestry comes from our local area. For instance, a Japanese person today would have around 90% of their ancestors from Japan, with a smaller percentage from neighboring countries like China, and an even smaller fraction from distant places, like Scotland. Although they share the same genealogical ancestors with a modern Scot, the likelihood of inheriting any genes from those ancestors is slim, due to the small proportion of them in their ancestry. Similarly, the modern Scot would have far more Scottish ancestors proportionally in their ancestry, and only small proportion of Japanese. So while we share the same distant ancestors, the genetic inheritance we receive from can vary greatly depending on regional proportions. [Rhode 2003]
This was an estimation in a paper, showing the vast difference in number between genetic ancestors and genealogical ancestors:
For instance, we estimate that someone from Hungary shares on average about five genetic common ancestors with someone from the United Kingdom between 18 and 50 generations ago. Since 1/r(36) = 5.8×107, we would conservatively estimate that for every genetic common ancestor there are tens of millions of genealogical common ancestors. Most of these ancestors must be genealogical common ancestors many times over, but these must still represent at least thousands of distinct individuals. [Ralph & Coop 2013].
Conclusion
Thus, in this article, and exploring our shared ancestry, we have discovered that having royal roots is far more common than we might expect. As research shows, millions—if not hundreds of millions—of people with British, Irish, and broader European roots can trace their family history back to medieval royalty like Edward III. And go back far enough in anyone's ancestry, no matter the society, and you'll find that they have ancestors that were amongst the top echelon of that society. The significance of this study extends far beyond curiosity about our upper class connections. It highlights the universal truth that all human beings are connected through a vast genealogical web, many times over, whether or not we can trace it through records. This gives us a renewed, perhaps entirely new, sense of connectedness to people and places.
It should also be clear now that while genetics has certainly revolutionized genealogical research, and our picture of the human story, it’s not a magic bullet and must be paired up with good old classical genealogical research. We have so many genealogical ancestors that we have received not a single drop of blood, nor even one gene, yet they still had to exist for us to be here today, and we should appreciate their story as well.
I'd like to finish with a statement by Joseph T. Chang, a Yale mathematician, whose 1999 paper kick-started academic mathematicians properly looking at the applications of mathematics to genealogy and ancestry, which, as a mathematics student, deeply appeals to me:
No matter the languages we speak or the color of our skin, we share ancestors who planted rice on the banks of the Yangtze, who first domesticated horses on the steppes of the Ukraine, who hunted giant sloths in the forests of North and South America, and who labored to build the Great Pyramid of Khufu.
Indeed, it is almost certain that we descend from Pharaoh Khufu himself. [Chang 1999]
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References
Bibliography
[Mortimer, Ian, 2006, The Perfect King: The Life of King Edward III]
[Rutherford, Adam, 2016, A Brief History of Everyone Who Ever Lived]
[Mortimer, Ian, 2008, The Time Traveller's Guide to Medieval England]
[cooplab, 2003, How many genetic ancestors do I have?]
[Adolph, Anthony, 2013, Tracing Your Aristocratic Ancestors]
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