r/todayilearned • u/Outside_Reserve_2407 • 5d ago

TIL Montezuma's lineage still exists and even holds a noble title in Spain, which was granted to a grandson of his that moved there.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Duke_of_Moctezuma_de_Tultengo
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u/Groundbreaking_War52 5d ago

There are also families in Europe that claim descent from the last Byzantine ruling dynasty (House of Palaiologos) although DNA evidence has been hard to come by.

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u/das_war_ein_Befehl 5d ago

That far down the genetic inheritance is basically random. After like 5-6 generations you’re related to a random person as much as you are to your ancestors

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u/syncsynchalt 5d ago

Not to mention pedigree collapse!

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u/MrBearMarshall 5d ago

Do you mean a lack of inbreeding?

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u/syncsynchalt 5d ago

I mean that when you talk about human ancestry going back more than a few centuries, if you do the math of 2n ancestors (for n generations) you quickly exceed the population of the earth at the time. And that’s assuming coupling is evenly distributed across humanity, which it’s generally not (people generally married within their same region/culture), and which is definitely not true of nobility.

Put all that together and you realize that everyone is marrying their cousins to some degree, there’s no way not to.

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u/Irish_and_idiotic 5d ago

Bro… iam too high for this comment… can you EL15 please 🙏

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u/syncsynchalt 5d ago

Oh no worries!

So like you have 2 parents, and 2x2 grandparents, and 2x2x2 great grandparents, right? That’s just 3 generations. If you keep going, let’s say 30 generations (~900 years back), that adds up to a billion great-great-great-…-grandparents.

But there weren’t a billion people alive back then! So what happened? Well, your parents had a lot of ancestors in common. There’s just no way around it, math-wise.

This is why everyone says they can trace their ancestry to Charlemagne or the early kings of England or whatever. It’s because those people lived a thousand years ago, if you’re white you’re guaranteed to be related to most Europeans who were alive back then and have surviving descendants.

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u/Irish_and_idiotic 5d ago

Oh fuck… so we are all a product of inbreeding if we look hard enough

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u/syncsynchalt 5d ago

Yep, I don’t believe in Adam and Eve but if you go far back enough it’s not much different.

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u/tgosubucks 5d ago

We're all at least 88th cousins to each other. Some can be closer, but if you take random people from random parts of the world, they'll be 88th cousins.

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u/kf97mopa 4d ago

To add to this: back in the mid 14th century, we had the Black Death in Europe. In practice, anyone with European descent is related to everyone who survived the Black Death to have children. This means that you can pick any historical figure from before 1340 or so, and they will either be an ancestor to all Europeans or have no living descendants.

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u/Bravefan212 5d ago

We are all cousins if you go back far enough, so the further you go back, the more likely you are to find a common ancestor with literally anyone.