"Mary perched on the edge of the sofa, watching him with large eyes. He wondered if Wulfnoth and Eadgar were among her ancestors. Yes...undoubtedly they were, after all these centuries. Maybe Schtein was too."
-Poul Anderson, "Time Patrol" IN Anderson, Time Patrol (Riverdale, NY, 2010), 6, p. 47.
(Schtein had traveled to the fifth century from 2987.)
"If you go back to the Visigoths...or even just medieval times...everyone is descended from everyone, including Charlemagne and Genghis Khan, she thought but did not say. You can prove that with some simple mathematics."
-SM Stirling, Black Chamber (New York, 2018), FIVE, p. 102.
Each of us has:
two parents;
four grandparents;
eight grandparents;
sixteen great-grandparents;
thirty two great-great-grandparents;
sixty four great-great-great-grandparents.
That is six generations. From 500 to 1940 A.D. is seventy two generations and the world population shrinks as we travel pastward. It seems to me that I have always been more interested in the fact of our common ancestry than in tracing my particular line of descent but it might have been Poul Anderson's "Time Patrol" that made me aware of common ancestry.
Bryan Talbot ends his Alice In Sunderland by celebrating descent from Picts, Celts, Romans, Africans, Middle Easterners, Gauls, English, Vikings, Danes, Normans, Irish, Europeans, Belgians, Lithuanians and Jewish Poles. A man to whom I handed an anti-racist leaflet in Lancaster was outraged when I claimed that everyone is related and tried to insult me by saying that I looked Chinese!
5 comments:
Kaor, Paul!
I agree, we all have a good deal of common ancestry. Ancestry DNA reported that I'm 75 percent Scots, Irish, and Welsh. And and that another 8% was Iberian (Spain and Portugal), and six percent "other". But that still leaves another 11 percent unaccounted for. I could be whimsical and say I have 11 percent ancestry from "space aliens"! (Smiles)
Sean
Sean,
Or time travelers.
Paul.
Kaor, Paul!
Meaning I might have ancestors who came from the FUTURE? That is so counter intuitive!
(Smiles)
Sean
I turned out to be 2% Native American, and considering that 3 of my 4 grandparents were born in England... 8-). This accords with a family legend and means I'm part Beothuk, a people who were driven into extinction in the early 19th century. Genetic ghosts persist.
Of course, we're not all -equally- descended from everyone.
10% of Asia is descended from Temujin/Genghis Khan because he and his immediate descendants among the Chingissid princes had enormous hareems of women taken willy-nilly; DNA research indicates that "differential reproductive success" by powerful men is important enough to be genetically visible long afterwards almost everywhere. A large proportion of the Irish are descended from the "Uí Néill", from Nial of the Nine Hostages, who figures in Poul's "King of Ys" series.
In Britain, there are several genetic discontinuities, as ancient DNA research has indicated. The most radical happened in the Bronze Age, when the previous population -- the Neolithic farmers who built Stonehenge, ultimately derived from Anatolia -- were almost completely replaced by the "Beaker People", immigrants (or more accurately invaders) from the Rhine Delta area.
There's a 90% genetic break when that happened, and it only took about 100 years; it's fully comparable to the European impact on the Americas after Columbus, and it's far from the only one they're discovering as ancient DNA becomes more available.
Dear Mr. Stirling,
I have heard of how many people today are descended from Genghis Khan! Even I might be a descendant, as part of that unaccounted for 11 percent of my ancestry. Altho I was hoping more to have some Neanderthal ancestry! (Smiles)
Sean
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