Everyone is descended from royalty. It’s just the way it works. At this point this fact should be so well known the universal reaction should be a yawn. But somehow the news hasn’t reached a lot of researchers. So, worth another post.

Adam Rutherford wrote about this recently. He starts off, “Charlemagne, Carolingian King of the Franks, Holy Roman Emperor, the great European conciliator; your ancestor. I am making an assumption that you are broadly of European descent, which is not statistically unreasonable but certainly not definitive. If you’re not, be patient, and we’ll come to your own very regal ancestry soon enough.“

Good for you, Adam. One of these days I’m going to dig into my maze of links and come up with more on this topic.

• Adam Rutherford, “You’re Descended from Royalty and So Is Everybody Else: Anybody you can name from ancient history is in your family tree“, Nautilus <nautil.us> (Jan. 4, 2018). Nefertiti, Confucius, Genghis Khan, and Charlemagne Are Almost Certainly on Your Family Tree.