ONE of the first things someone wonders when they start delving into their family tree is if they are related to anyone exciting.
The simple answer to this is yes. Without looking at your extended family tree I can pretty much say you are. Well, this is what the geneticists say.
Firstly from a genealogical point of view, it just makes mathematical sense. No matter where in the world you are from you would be related in some form to someone famous, in the past or present. From Shaka Zulu to Genghis Khan or Edward I, their distant cousins walk amongst us.
If we consider the sheer scale of our ancestors and all of their descendents, we are related to millions of people who lived over a fairly brief amount of time as far as world history is concerned. Going upward we have 64 grandparents at only six generations back and 16 384 grandparents at the 13th generation (circa 1500).
So while we may be able to identify some grandparents at 13 generations back they are but a tiny proportion of the total bloodline that have created us.
Likewise, coming down and into other descendents it is possible if a person has five children and they have also five children, as was common in early days, that in the space of eight generations we would be one of more than 1.95 million descendents of one individual, making nearly 2 million distant cousins, in one particular generation.
This is why genealogists agree that practically everyone of European decent living today and almost certainly all of the aristocracy will have some bloodline link to Charlemagne or the Plantagenet Kings. However, it is finding these links that proves difficult. Only the affluent, lucky and connected were able to store family lineages.
Even in more recent history records of the 1700’s have been lost in churches and gravestones have worn away, deleting valuable information. It is often only through luck and professional perseverance that it is therefore possible to link families back as far as 700 AD.
Alfred the Great is another common ancestor for many people in Europe as he had lots of daughters and granddaughters who married continental rulers. This leads genealogists to believe that everyone with any significant Western European descent, about 2 billion people, would be related to old Alfred the Great.
The British geneticist, Dr Adam Rutherford, has modeled this theory on Edward III who was born in 1312 and had 17 children with Philippa of Hainault, including John of Gaunt and Edward the Black Prince. This royal couple had a sizeable brood of over 324 identifiable great great grandchildren. Rutherford found that if each of these had on average two surviving children, then Edward would have had a total of around 20 544 descendants in 1600.
He then considered that the population of Britain at that time was around 4.2 million, meaning around 1 in 210 people were probably direct descendants of Edward III – approximately 0.5 per cent of the population. This was modelled further to 1975 and Rutherford concluded that if we have upwards of 32 768 ancestors in 1600 at a time when 0.5 percent are related to Edward III, we could have about 163 ancestors related to the prolific king.
He concluded that mathematically, the chances of not being descended from Edward would therefore be miniscule. His book, A Brief History of Everyone Who Ever Lived, explores this further with links to other royal lineages. Eleanor of Aquitaine (1122-1204) who was married to Henry II of England and Louis VII of France is seen as another significant progenitor and is often referred to as the Mother of Europe.
Other geneticists like Edward Millard have also tested this theory and agreed that even accounting for isolated groups in UK society or cousins marrying cousins, the probability of a link to Edward III would remain greater than 80% and 100% for Alfred the Great.
It is also believed that much of the dispersion of Alfred the Great’s genes into the far regions of Scotland would have taken place long before the Norman Conquest that brought a new batch of Alfred’s descendants.
The Carolingian King of the Franks, Emperor Charlemagne, who died in 814 AD is another favourite ancestor that aristocrats through generations have boasted their descent from. But, geneticists now agree that his name would turn up in most people’s family trees today if they could trace them.
In 2001 geneticists, Peter Ralph and Graham Coop, showed that all Europeans are descended from the same people who were alive in the 9th century – not just Charlemagne. They include everyone who was alive then and had children whose genes have been carried on.
Geneticists refer to a point in time when we have every ancestor in common - a genetic isopoint.
You might assume this would have occurred at our very beginnings, when humans left Africa and spread throughout the world around 120 000 years ago. But, the genetic isopoint occurred much more recently - somewhere between 5300 and 2200 B.C., according to statistician Douglas Rohde from MIT. Rohde theorised that in 1400 BC or even as late as 55 AD there was one individual who could have been a common ancestor of all of us no matter where in the world we are from.
DNA analysis has brought a new perspective to this issue. Simplistically put, we inherit two basic parts of DNA from our parents – the Y chromosome from our fathers and mitochondrial DNA from our mothers. So that’s 2% - the other 98% is randomly inherited from a mix of our ancestors in varying degrees. This is why we may look a bit different to our siblings and surprisingly similar to a cousin or Aunt.
Geneticists have studied a vast pool of DNA across Asia to test the theory that Genghis Khan is a prolific common ancestor. They found that there are over 16 million men across 127 population groups alive today with a slice of Genghis Khan’s DNA in common.
This is pretty startling when we consider that as generations progress we inherit less and less directly from older generations.
This has been likened to a homeopathic dilution where there are no discernible molecules left of an active ingredient. This means that after five generations it is possible not to have any DNA at all from some of your 6th times great grandparent. So while you might very well be descended from Charlemagne, Edward III and Genghis Khan, it is a lot less likely you carry any of their DNA.
This means that while we may be genealogically related to a host of famous people we are probably not genetically related to anyone too far from the family we already know.
So before you have sleepless nights about being distant cousins of everyone from Donald Trump to Kim Kardashian you can rest assured it’s very unlikely that you have the same genes responsible for their famous derriere or hair.
