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Royal Bloodlines Abound!



Another brief update on a topic we’ve been watching here (and elsewhere) for some time: the idea of royal bloodlines weaving throughout history.

AOL News has an article about how “genealogists” have suddenly “discovered” that royal blood flows through most people.

Even without a documented connection to a notable forebear, experts say the odds are virtually 100 percent that every person on Earth is descended from one royal personage or another.

“Millions of people have provable descents from medieval monarchs,” said Mark Humphrys, a genealogy enthusiast and professor of computer science at Dublin City University in Ireland. “The number of people with unprovable descents must be massive.” […]

It works the other way, too. Anybody who had children more than a few hundred years ago is likely to have millions of descendants today, and quite a few famous ones. […]

The longer ago somebody lived, the more descendants a person is likely to have today. Humphrys estimates that Muhammad, the founder of Islam, appears on the family tree of every person in the Western world.

These facts are nothing new and we’ve had people mention similar statistics many times on this site. So I have to ask, why is there a news article about this? More importantly, why did they use the actress Brooke Shields as the centerpiece for the entire article? I didn’t include any relevant quotes above, but they go to great length to disclose her highly royal pedigree. For what reason? Obviously it makes the topic at hand more concrete if we use a specific person, and celebrities are always a popular subject. But why Brooke Shields? Why not Bruce Springsteen or Mitch Hedberg or any one of a million other celebrities? This is one of those things that we’ll never know the answer to and it’s probably inconsequential. But that’s never stopped me before, so oh well!

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3 Reader Responses

  1. Terry Says:
    July 5th, 2006 at 12:52 pm

    Matt Crenson, the AP writer of the story, is a science writer. Recently he wrote two articles: Roots of Human Family Tree Are Shallow and the one you cited.

    In the Roots of Human Family Tree article he goes into greater depth on the science of common ancestry. In that article he quotes professor Jotun Hein from a Nature article (date uncited). My guess is that because Hein has a forthcoming book coming out Genealogies, Variation and Evolution, Matt Crenson was sent a review copy and wrote the Roots of Human Family Tree article in response to his investigation of Hein’s, and other’s whose research is similar.

    Crenson also got in touch with Dr. Mark Humphrys, who is someone in which the press usually calls upon as an expert on royal genealogy and common ancestry. He quotes Humphrys in both articles. But the second one is a more mainstream one geared toward a larger audience, and thus the information of Shields’ pedigree was used as a device to show how most everyone has royalty genes. She is listed as a descendant of Edward III at Humphrys’ Royal Descents of famous people webpage.

  2. Tim Boucher Says:
    July 5th, 2006 at 12:56 pm

    Ah, excellent research. Thanks! I suspected there was somebody’s book being promoted in all of this…

  3. Gnomely Says:
    July 5th, 2006 at 5:39 pm

    On an irrelevant inane side not, Brooke was born May 31, 1965 that would make her a Gemini.
    Nothing personal against Gemini’s but their flighty attitude and conversational banter is annoying when you are trying to concentrate on watching taped episodes of the Twilight Zone marathon—- personal experience.



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