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We know so little that there is no verified unbroken lineage between anybody from Antiquity to the Middle Ages. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Descent_from_anti

by bhaak 4y ago

We know so little that there is no verified unbroken lineage between anybody from Antiquity to the Middle Ages. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Descent_from_antiquity https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Descent_from_antiquity

ginko 4y ago
Meanwhile there's people alive today who claim main line descent from Confucius who lived in the 5th century BC. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kung_Tsui-chang https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kung_Tsui-chang
- thaumasiotes 4y ago
  China also has a continuous literary tradition between that time and now, so the claims are plausible. I'm actually more impressed that the old Chinese imperial families are still around: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/House_of_Zhao https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/House_of_Zhao https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/House_of_Zhu https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/House_of_Zhu In what I would think of as the "standard model" of history, one of the highest priorities for a new king is eliminating everyone who might theoretically be related to the old king.
  - vkazanov 4y ago
    Yeah.. even the last Chinese emperor wasn't executed, despite the endless civil war and his cooperation with Japanese.
    - thaumasiotes 4y ago
      On the other hand, membership in that family is unlikely to be something you want widely advertised. I believe most of them changed their name.
  - SZJX 4y ago
    It does seem to be a Chinese tradition (and I believe in quite a few other places) to pacify the old king and grant them a comfortable enough retirement, as they’ve already lost power. It’s probably less confrontational and somewhat satisfies all sides in the long run. Examples would be some kings during the Three Kingdom period, who all got some sort of honorary title in the conqueror’s kingdom.
- jl6 4y ago
  What does “main line” mean in this context?
  - prox 4y ago
    I would assume father > son descent, so oldest son is usually the main inheritor.
    - abirch 4y ago
      Depth First Search for heirs.
      - JasonFruit 4y ago
        That sounds like an elevator pitch.
- bhaak 4y ago
  We lost a lot of historical records between late antiquity and the early middle ages. Most devastating for Italy was probably the Gothic War. Then the records that were in Constantinople were also lost, not only by the fall of Constantinople itself but also by the sacking of it by Christian crusaders. Lots of records that could have shown such a descent are lost. Now Confucius was an important historical figure. It's not surprising that he is one of the few cases where an uninterrupted descent could be true. If Jesus or Caesar had a family line run into modern times or if the Papacy was hereditary, we might have such a line for Western civilization as well.
  - JamesSwift 4y ago
    China also has kept a fairly robust set of records compared to the rest of the world.
  - stackbutterflow 4y ago
    Would be hard for Jesus, given he didn't exist.
    - tsimionescu 4y ago
      That is an extremely fringe belief, in disagreement with most scholars of antiquity.
      - ncmncm 4y ago
        But the gradient is positive.
        bhaak 4y ago
        What's that supposed to mean?
        ncmncm 4y ago
        In 1900, no historians thought Jesus was like Moses, Abraham, and Adam, made up from whole cloth. In 2000, some did. Today, more. The scenario as I understand it is that Paul's writing came first. But to get a congregation to pay attention they found they had to invent a corporeal Jesus to have said their things, then apostles to have heard them, then a bio for where and when, and finally gospels to tell it in. For those who object that such a thing wasn't done, consider Moses and, really, all of Genesis and Exodus. Iliad. Thor'n'Loki. It was not just done, but positively demanded.
- peter303 4y ago
  Japanese emperors back to 600 BCE.
- peter303 4y ago
  Genealogists have worked out most American Presidents 800 years or so. A couple interesting facts include (1) about everyone one of them is at least 10th cousin to every other one and (2) a large fraction descend from King John of England. Probability suggests that after a millennium that that someone becomes a super-ancestor, i.e. everyone is descended from them, or no one is descended from them. Very little middle ground. (A lot of northwest European Americans probably have the same statistics as Presidents.)
Spooky23 4y ago
These were totally different systems between the Roman era (or eras) and the catholic Western European system of nobility. Even at the peak of the empire, it wasn’t like driving around in a modern nation state, there were all sorts of associated kingdoms and tribes within the borders you see in history books. In many ways the empire was like a franchise with local governors wielding varying power and independence. As the empire declined, association with that state became less relevant, so they dropped the pageantry of being the great grandson of Marcus Whomeveritus. As the petty kings and nobility started consolidating and emerging as “legitimate” in a system, the “mists of antiquity” served to launder that your background descended from an usurper governor, tax farmer, or barbarian warlord.
walnutclosefarm 4y ago
And what we do know, doesn't necessarily mean what those searching for descent from antiquity think it means. All tracing of such descent assumes that pregnancies involved known paternity, whereas we know that in general, there is a lot of error in recorded paternities (one of the more interesting side effects of DNA sequencing, both in consumer offerings, and in medical and official use, is demonstration that far more children are not the children of their named or assumed father than was suspected). Add to that, the fact that you could potentially have, say, Charlemagne in your direct line of descent, and still have none of his genetic material in your makeup. This is so because at the remove of Charlemagne, you're 48, give or take a few, generations, removed from the trillions of leaves on your family tree, but you get roughly 1/2^-n of your DNA from an nth generation progenitor and have only 2^36th or so base pairs of DNA in your entire genome. So, Charlemagne can be your umpty-great grandfather, and yet you in be in no genetic sense, a descendent of Charlemagne. In other words, past a dozen or so generations, any data we've got on bloodlines has a lousy signal to noise ratio for proving direct descent.
- OkayPhysicist 4y ago
  Matrilineal or patrilineal lines give you much stronger signals than that, though, thanks to mitochondrial and Y-chromosome DNA respectively.
  - tsimionescu 4y ago
    Sure, but unbroken patrilineal or matrilineal lines of descent are rather improbable over such long times - any family that had only sons or only daughters breaks the line, and that's not particularly uncommon. Add some infidelity into the mix and it becomes even harder to believe.
  - walnutclosefarm 4y ago
    I don't see how. Sure, if you had mitochondrial DNA from your long-dead male ancestors, you could suss out your true patrilineal line of descent, but it's extremely unlikely that such data is available. You might be able to get it by inference by analyzing the fanned-out descendents of a relatively recent putative paternal ancestor - back 8 or maybe ten generations, but even that's unusual. And, if you're targeting a specific ancestor, it requires an unbroken line of paternal descent - as soon as your path to, say, Henry VIII goes through a female descendent, at any generation, you've lost the Y chromosome relationship. Same argument applies with the sex roles reversed for females and mitchondrial inheritance. At ten generations back, you've got 1024 grandmother leaves on your tree. Only one of them is your mother's mother's .. mother's mother. At 20 generations (say, 500 years, so the actual age of Henry VIII), you've got a million grandmother or grandfather leaves on your tree, and only one is purely matrilineal, and one purely patrilineal. (That doesn't mean, of course, that you've got a million distinct grand^20 fathers - it'll be way less than that, because the some men will appear on many different leaves, and the same for mothers. But the odds that the path you claim to Henry VII is purely maternal or purely paternal are still very small.

by bhaak 4y ago

ginko 4y ago

Meanwhile there's people alive today who claim main line descent from Confucius who lived in the 5th century BC. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kung_Tsui-chang https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kung_Tsui-chang

thaumasiotes 4y ago
China also has a continuous literary tradition between that time and now, so the claims are plausible. I'm actually more impressed that the old Chinese imperial families are still around: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/House_of_Zhao https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/House_of_Zhao https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/House_of_Zhu https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/House_of_Zhu In what I would think of as the "standard model" of history, one of the highest priorities for a new king is eliminating everyone who might theoretically be related to the old king.
- vkazanov 4y ago
  Yeah.. even the last Chinese emperor wasn't executed, despite the endless civil war and his cooperation with Japanese.
  - thaumasiotes 4y ago
    On the other hand, membership in that family is unlikely to be something you want widely advertised. I believe most of them changed their name.
- SZJX 4y ago
  It does seem to be a Chinese tradition (and I believe in quite a few other places) to pacify the old king and grant them a comfortable enough retirement, as they’ve already lost power. It’s probably less confrontational and somewhat satisfies all sides in the long run. Examples would be some kings during the Three Kingdom period, who all got some sort of honorary title in the conqueror’s kingdom.
jl6 4y ago
What does “main line” mean in this context?
- prox 4y ago
  I would assume father > son descent, so oldest son is usually the main inheritor.
  - abirch 4y ago
    Depth First Search for heirs.
    - JasonFruit 4y ago
      That sounds like an elevator pitch.
bhaak 4y ago
We lost a lot of historical records between late antiquity and the early middle ages. Most devastating for Italy was probably the Gothic War. Then the records that were in Constantinople were also lost, not only by the fall of Constantinople itself but also by the sacking of it by Christian crusaders. Lots of records that could have shown such a descent are lost. Now Confucius was an important historical figure. It's not surprising that he is one of the few cases where an uninterrupted descent could be true. If Jesus or Caesar had a family line run into modern times or if the Papacy was hereditary, we might have such a line for Western civilization as well.
- JamesSwift 4y ago
  China also has kept a fairly robust set of records compared to the rest of the world.
- stackbutterflow 4y ago
  Would be hard for Jesus, given he didn't exist.
  - tsimionescu 4y ago
    That is an extremely fringe belief, in disagreement with most scholars of antiquity.
    - ncmncm 4y ago
      But the gradient is positive.
      - bhaak 4y ago
        What's that supposed to mean?
        ncmncm 4y ago
        In 1900, no historians thought Jesus was like Moses, Abraham, and Adam, made up from whole cloth. In 2000, some did. Today, more. The scenario as I understand it is that Paul's writing came first. But to get a congregation to pay attention they found they had to invent a corporeal Jesus to have said their things, then apostles to have heard them, then a bio for where and when, and finally gospels to tell it in. For those who object that such a thing wasn't done, consider Moses and, really, all of Genesis and Exodus. Iliad. Thor'n'Loki. It was not just done, but positively demanded.
peter303 4y ago
Japanese emperors back to 600 BCE.
peter303 4y ago
Genealogists have worked out most American Presidents 800 years or so. A couple interesting facts include (1) about everyone one of them is at least 10th cousin to every other one and (2) a large fraction descend from King John of England. Probability suggests that after a millennium that that someone becomes a super-ancestor, i.e. everyone is descended from them, or no one is descended from them. Very little middle ground. (A lot of northwest European Americans probably have the same statistics as Presidents.)

Spooky23 4y ago

These were totally different systems between the Roman era (or eras) and the catholic Western European system of nobility. Even at the peak of the empire, it wasn’t like driving around in a modern nation state, there were all sorts of associated kingdoms and tribes within the borders you see in history books. In many ways the empire was like a franchise with local governors wielding varying power and independence. As the empire declined, association with that state became less relevant, so they dropped the pageantry of being the great grandson of Marcus Whomeveritus. As the petty kings and nobility started consolidating and emerging as “legitimate” in a system, the “mists of antiquity” served to launder that your background descended from an usurper governor, tax farmer, or barbarian warlord.

walnutclosefarm 4y ago

And what we do know, doesn't necessarily mean what those searching for descent from antiquity think it means. All tracing of such descent assumes that pregnancies involved known paternity, whereas we know that in general, there is a lot of error in recorded paternities (one of the more interesting side effects of DNA sequencing, both in consumer offerings, and in medical and official use, is demonstration that far more children are not the children of their named or assumed father than was suspected). Add to that, the fact that you could potentially have, say, Charlemagne in your direct line of descent, and still have none of his genetic material in your makeup. This is so because at the remove of Charlemagne, you're 48, give or take a few, generations, removed from the trillions of leaves on your family tree, but you get roughly 1/2^-n of your DNA from an nth generation progenitor and have only 2^36th or so base pairs of DNA in your entire genome. So, Charlemagne can be your umpty-great grandfather, and yet you in be in no genetic sense, a descendent of Charlemagne. In other words, past a dozen or so generations, any data we've got on bloodlines has a lousy signal to noise ratio for proving direct descent.

OkayPhysicist 4y ago
Matrilineal or patrilineal lines give you much stronger signals than that, though, thanks to mitochondrial and Y-chromosome DNA respectively.
- tsimionescu 4y ago
  Sure, but unbroken patrilineal or matrilineal lines of descent are rather improbable over such long times - any family that had only sons or only daughters breaks the line, and that's not particularly uncommon. Add some infidelity into the mix and it becomes even harder to believe.
- walnutclosefarm 4y ago
  I don't see how. Sure, if you had mitochondrial DNA from your long-dead male ancestors, you could suss out your true patrilineal line of descent, but it's extremely unlikely that such data is available. You might be able to get it by inference by analyzing the fanned-out descendents of a relatively recent putative paternal ancestor - back 8 or maybe ten generations, but even that's unusual. And, if you're targeting a specific ancestor, it requires an unbroken line of paternal descent - as soon as your path to, say, Henry VIII goes through a female descendent, at any generation, you've lost the Y chromosome relationship. Same argument applies with the sex roles reversed for females and mitchondrial inheritance. At ten generations back, you've got 1024 grandmother leaves on your tree. Only one of them is your mother's mother's .. mother's mother. At 20 generations (say, 500 years, so the actual age of Henry VIII), you've got a million grandmother or grandfather leaves on your tree, and only one is purely matrilineal, and one purely patrilineal. (That doesn't mean, of course, that you've got a million distinct grand^20 fathers - it'll be way less than that, because the some men will appear on many different leaves, and the same for mothers. But the odds that the path you claim to Henry VII is purely maternal or purely paternal are still very small.