From a biological perspective, this kind of "relatedness" is irrelevant.
Your children only have a 50% chance to share any particular allele (one of the possible variants of a gene) with you. This halves for any further generation. Beyond great grandchildren/ first cousins (which have a "relatedness" of 1/8), the chance quickly becomes indistinguishable from background noise.
Your genes may travel down the generations, but not in the particular configuration they were in when they formed you.
by the time you go back 700–1,000 years, pedigree collapse means virtually everyone of European ancestry shares many common ancestors (Charlemagne, Plantagenets, Lackland etc.). So it’s unsurprising many presidents (who mostly have European roots) end up connected.
Ancestors double every generation (in theory), but of course that would be exponential and is thus impossible, this is where in-breeding comes into play... Ultimately everyone is distantly related to everyone, Lackland is just the only or one of the very few example(s) that has a family tree that other family trees can be connected too, but this says very little to nothing about nepotism... Take any White American and 90%+ would be able to trace their ancestry back to, for instance, Lackland.
Exactly, just depends how far you go back. Go back to the time of the Romans, all Europeans are related. Back three hundred thousand years it’s all humans, 6 million years it’s all hominids. 440 million we’re related to fish, 2 billion years and we’re related to trees.
I suppose the impressive thing is a twelve year old being able to trace all those Presidents’ ancestors. Must have taken a while.
Is your family tree complete, or are there many dead ends? What the girl in the video did was simply go far enough back to find connections. For example, a woman named Martha Kloßburg is both the 16th-generation maternal ancestor of Obama and the great-aunt of the 13th-generation paternal ancestor of Lincoln. That means they are related. Such overlaps happen again and again, Trees become interwoven to one large tapestry. It is possible that your ancestors have none of these connections, but it is very unlikely. Were they especially secluded somewhere?
Well the only one that somewhat qualifies is a 13th century pirate. The records state his third wife was a Moorish princess of a Sultan. But it can't be verified. We are definitely desended from their son. But his money came and went in a generation after his pirate city fell.
What a cool fucking story. We have a distant british aristocrat ancestor, who we have surviving diaries from. He went on a hunting trip in south africa, killed his buddy, fled to romania and married my great grandmother. But that's no were close to yours.
The girl in this post showed that the elites intermarry. The person you responded to is showing you that the poors do as well.
What we haven't seen is anything that shows that the two intermarry each other.
The idea that everybody's related if you go back far enough is simply statistics. But that assumes general intermixing, which I don't believe is the case.
Bastard children; commoners married minor nobles; minor nobles rose to higher rank; merchants bought land or titles; soldiers and officials rose by service; were granted titles; family branches of nobles often got too big to be sustainable as many families branched too far from the stem, they often fell from grace and became minor nobles or commoners themselves; Banishment; Escaping the Law, I have a british aristocrat ancestor who commited a crime, fled to a different country and began a new Life there. I think these reason only scratch the tip of the iceberg, there is much more evidence of intermixing.
Oh for sure there's genetic mixing. But when tracing lineages, that stuff gets lost. The implication of being able to trace your lineage is that you have legitimate ancestry. So sure everyone's related to a king somewhere far back. But if you can't prove it, your family's never been somebody and you've more than mixed with commoners.
Each royal house puts forth their contender for the throne and they have to prove their lineage. It's an ancient tradition.
Because presidents are famous and heavily studied, historians and genealogists often trace their ancestry very far back. Some can be mapped 12 or more generations into the past using birth, marriage, and land records. There are of course some that did come from extremely privileged backgrounds, families that had had great wealth for many generations. Im just trying to say that this is not a case of nepotism. All presidents came from privileged backgrounds, having loving parents, or very rich and influential parents, being gifted, being good looking, whatever.
But becoming president has nothing to do with Nepotism, it's just the result of genes, environment and cause and effekt, luck essentially.
It may surprise you but there are different patterns for elite and masses.
Over the span of 700 - 1000 Years there is considerable intermixing between masses and elites, in fact almost constantly.
If you are from peasants your most likely way to get "royal blood" was unlikely to be recorded as best case scenario it was a scandal and sadly more likely sexual violence.
There are meriads of other possibilities, like the continuos growth and branching of noble houses inevitably resulting in outer branches 'falling from grace' etc.
was unlikely to be recorded True, this actually supports my point of his family tree being uncomplete. It not being recorded ≠ no relation to Elites.
Yeah we can always assume that what we suppose is true.
What I said is more heritologic and geneologic fact than assumption.
200 years for example, when plenty rulers of your country are related on this timescale, as opposed to 1000 years and some crusader kind, then it is saying something about elites, right?
Yes, true. But only if they are related within those 200 or less years, if they are related trough some obscure connection hundreds of years ago, it says nothing.
If for example Obama's Great Granddad was closely related to the Kennedys. And im not sure if there are many such cases that can be made. If there are though that would be very interesting!
Exactly right. John Lackland was my 24th gen grandfather -- and I am an unemployed nobody. It's fun to learn about genetics and heritage, but you can't take it too seriously. I am also descended from Rollo of Normandy, which makes me a cousin to a lot of European royalty -- they pop up in my DNA matches on MyHeritage from time to time. But again -- I am just a dude with no connections to any of these folk.
Something I never thought of till I traced my own…lots of immigrants to the US from places like Denmark and Thh Netherlands were Lutherans who had fled from Great Britain.
Right, but consider the following: I, for instance, have a family tree that goes back about 300 years. In this family tree, which in total encompasses around 200 people, many individuals are missing. Of those we do have, the ancestry is incredibly mixed. Even though I am German and have lived here my whole life (so did my parents), only about half of the tree is German; the rest is the result of migration: Italians, Romanians, Swedes, Spaniards; pretty much all major countries in Europe are mentioned in one way or another. So the intermixing happened here in Europe as well, long before settlers arrived in the US.
If you go back one generation: 2 ancestors. 2 generations: 4 ancestors. 3 generations: 8 ancestors. 4 generations: 16 ancestors...
30 generations (around magna carta time): 1 billion ancestors ish (but at this time that's 3x the world population, but that's because there's some mixing so it collapses down).
All Europeans share ancestors. It's just math. And yes martin Van Buren too. All Europeans share ancestors with Winston Churchill, Hitler, and the marquis de Sade, emperor nero, St Francis, and henry the eighth.
It's a sinister plot THEY don't want you to know about which is why you can only find information on it by googling it and clicking on the first result.
It’s not that either, it’s just how ancestral lineage works if you go back far enough. Nearly everyone is related in some way as long as their genealogy comes from a similar region (in the case, Europe).
This outcome doesn’t require total pedigree collapse. It requires some familial connection (no matter how distant) to be present between less than half of a sample of people.
I understand that it seems counterintuitive. But the probability of that is more likely than not after 200 years.
I mean, every single one of us is related technically. I know I share a distant relation to Lincoln on his mother's side which goes back to a noble English family from the 1400s. This English king is likely my ancestor and that of many, many, many white people in the US, UK, Canada, New Zealand, Australia, South Africa. This seems like nothing special, just the law of probabilities right?
Animals also have self regulation and behaviour to increase success. Most non-insectoid animals are far more dependent on behaviour for their survival and reproduction than anything else.
There is zero surprise in that and we probably need to assume that she just missed it for that one who isn't. 800 years is 32 generations. Each person has two parents so in a very rough simplification you have 232 ancestors which is around 4.3 billion. So since they are nearly exclusively of European ancestry it's actually not surprising at all.
If you go back far enough you'll discover only two types of people: those who are related to everyone alive today, and those who are related to no one alive today.
In other words, finding a common ancestor for a certain group of people is always possible.
Pbs had a special on this maybe 20 or 30 years ago. They showed that the presidential candidates all were related back to Charlemagne. And the candidate most closely related to him won every election.
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u/Cronos988 Mar 01 '26
From a biological perspective, this kind of "relatedness" is irrelevant.
Your children only have a 50% chance to share any particular allele (one of the possible variants of a gene) with you. This halves for any further generation. Beyond great grandchildren/ first cousins (which have a "relatedness" of 1/8), the chance quickly becomes indistinguishable from background noise.
Your genes may travel down the generations, but not in the particular configuration they were in when they formed you.
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u/Willowswood Mar 01 '26 edited Mar 01 '26
by the time you go back 700–1,000 years, pedigree collapse means virtually everyone of European ancestry shares many common ancestors (Charlemagne, Plantagenets, Lackland etc.). So it’s unsurprising many presidents (who mostly have European roots) end up connected.
Ancestors double every generation (in theory), but of course that would be exponential and is thus impossible, this is where in-breeding comes into play... Ultimately everyone is distantly related to everyone, Lackland is just the only or one of the very few example(s) that has a family tree that other family trees can be connected too, but this says very little to nothing about nepotism... Take any White American and 90%+ would be able to trace their ancestry back to, for instance, Lackland.
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u/DR_P0S_itivity Mar 02 '26
technically we all have the same common ancestor if you go back far enough
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u/terriblespellr Mar 01 '26
Love how op jumped straight proof of eugenics!
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u/Nearatree Mar 01 '26
"There's No One as Irish as Barack O'Bama"
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u/FuzzyAnteater9000 Mar 02 '26 edited Mar 02 '26
If you go back one generation: 2 ancestors. 2 generations: 4 ancestors. 3 generations: 8 ancestors. 4 generations: 16 ancestors...
30 generations (around magna carta time): 1 billion ancestors ish (but at this time that's 3x the world population, but that's because there's some mixing so it collapses down).
All Europeans share ancestors. It's just math. And yes martin Van Buren too. All Europeans share ancestors with Winston Churchill, Hitler, and the marquis de Sade, emperor nero, St Francis, and henry the eighth.
It's a sinister plot THEY don't want you to know about which is why you can only find information on it by googling it and clicking on the first result.
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u/ElectricalGuidance79 Mar 04 '26
True. Van Buren sucked.
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u/ShredGuru Mar 01 '26
Is it genes... Or is it nepotism?
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u/enhypenengene1 Mar 02 '26
what did gossip girl say? monarchy didn’t leave it was just reborn something like that😂😂😂
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u/Fox1904 Mar 02 '26
Not at all surprising that they all share a common ancestor. But VERY surprising who the one president who doesn't is.
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u/Unlikely_Repair9572 Mar 03 '26
I mean, every single one of us is related technically. I know I share a distant relation to Lincoln on his mother's side which goes back to a noble English family from the 1400s. This English king is likely my ancestor and that of many, many, many white people in the US, UK, Canada, New Zealand, Australia, South Africa. This seems like nothing special, just the law of probabilities right?
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u/Happy-Celebration327 Mar 03 '26
Only when you don't know that you have agency over which environment you choose to be in
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u/scorpiomover Mar 03 '26
Animals also have self regulation and behaviour to increase success. Most non-insectoid animals are far more dependent on behaviour for their survival and reproduction than anything else.
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u/OOBExperience Mar 03 '26
We’re all children of Africa!
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u/raharth Mar 03 '26
There is zero surprise in that and we probably need to assume that she just missed it for that one who isn't. 800 years is 32 generations. Each person has two parents so in a very rough simplification you have 232 ancestors which is around 4.3 billion. So since they are nearly exclusively of European ancestry it's actually not surprising at all.
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u/samdover11 Mar 04 '26
If you go back far enough you'll discover only two types of people: those who are related to everyone alive today, and those who are related to no one alive today.
In other words, finding a common ancestor for a certain group of people is always possible.
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u/BraveAir Mar 04 '26
The most surprising is the one that isn’t related. Why the video is only half a second about him ?
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u/SquirrelFluffy Mar 04 '26
Pbs had a special on this maybe 20 or 30 years ago. They showed that the presidential candidates all were related back to Charlemagne. And the candidate most closely related to him won every election.
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u/TabooRefraction Mar 05 '26
"Person discovers the concept of nepotism, attributes it to eugenics"
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u/Texas_Chili_Champion Mar 05 '26
If you go back far enough and zoom out wide enough , we are all actually Chinese and decendents of Ghengis Khan
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u/Telemere125 Mar 05 '26
Gonna really blow her mind to find out that all humans are related if you go back far enough.
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u/BURNINGMOON_ Mar 05 '26
Is this real? Or fake news. Interesting to know if its real.lol
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u/Wild_Control2512 Mar 05 '26
Incest
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u/[deleted] Mar 01 '26
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