Reply #46: Because mathematically it's true.

[AshevilleGuy]

We have 2 parents, 4 grandparents, 8 g-grandparents, 16 g-g-grandparents, and so on. If you go back enough generations to get to the early part of the last milennium, you get millions or billions of ancestors.

But there were only a few million people in Europe at that time, so the chances are that two things are correct: 1) many ancestors had to be the same persons (cousins marrying causes this), and 2) some of our ancestors were 'royals' or at least part of the aristocracy. Of course, the hard part to identifying them is that it's hard to trace back through the centuries.

When you get back to before around 1500, most persons had no surnames - only the aristocracy did, which is why we only see 'pedigrees' with their names on them. Probably most every person alive now of Northern or Western European ancestry is a direct descendant of Charlemagne; it's no big deal and nothing to get excited about but it is fun to make the conection.

Here in Western NC, many people claim Cherokee heritage; I just smile and say, "That's nice", even though I usually do not believe them. Of course we are ALL descendants of a few thousand persons who lived in Ethiopia about 75,000 years ago. How DUMB does that fact make racism???