How is it possible for someone to trace a line of their lineage back to Adam?

by JohnnyRompain

I'm not sure if this is the right place to ask this, but here goes nothing.I was using a family history website (http://familysearch.org) and filled out my family tree, just a few generations back/ On one side, the majority of them came from England. As I went back, I got onto some royal bloodlines: Kings of Scotland, Ireland, the Picts, and by the time I got from AD to BC, the only lines I could find were Kings. Eventually I got to Kings of Scythia, then an Egyptian Pharaoh(Cinqueris), and finally it got to Noah, which then went back to Adam and Eve. I haveno idea how accurate these records are, even several generations back. Is there any bit of truth to this? Is there any proof of Noah,or Adam for that matter, existing? Or did somebody just tack on the names from the bible onto their family tree?

nickcan

Just going to stop you here. That website is run by the Church of Latter Day Saints so there is really no reason at all to accept their 'findings' as any where near accurate.

As for the existence of several of these Biblical figures there is zero historical evidence of Adam and Eve existing as they are depicted in the Bible.

Georgy_K_Zhukov

OK, its possible because someone made up something somewhere. Any genealogy that claims to show such a line of descent is BS. In genealogy, the "holy grail" is Descent from Antiquity. A proven line from someone in BCE all the way to the present. And at least in the Western World, it doesn't exist (There is one in China all the way to Confucious, but it includes adoption IIRC). There is a huge roadblock in the late Western Roman Empire, so outside of a very, very, very small number of lines, don't trust anything that goes back too far.

So even if we could prove that Noah or Adam were real, there is no proven line of descent. Now, that being said, while I wouldn't trust any genealogy chart that makes grandiose claims of antiquity, it actually isn't that hard to make a real, and interesting, family tree. The LDS is obsessed with genealogy (the whole baptize dead people thing, which someone else would have to explain better than I), and Family Search is a GREAT resource to use for the past few centuries. Not quite as good as Ancestry.com, but certainly cheaper.

Ok, so that's out of the way. Now for the other part of this... if the Noah stuff is BS, how about the Charlemagne connection you no doubt found? Well, you are related to him. I promise you that. But I can't promise the line of descent is true, as some people do like to make that stuff up. What separates royalty and you isn't that they are descended from important people and you aren't. We all are descended from the same people. Its that they are descended from a small number of lines we have good records for! Not to toot my own horn, but because I have one particular ancestor of note in the past few centuries I know to be a fact, it is possible to find proper records that connect him to minor nobility a few centuries earlier, and then all the way back to Royalty. But it isn't special. It just is sheer luck those records exist for me, and not for other people.

I've written about the nature of common ancestry before, so this longer piece might interest you! It don't talk about Noah, for obvious reasons, but William the Conqueror and Charlemagne are still pretty interesting to call granddad, right?

Most likely, every white European can, with reasonable confidence, claim descent from William the Conquerer, and at that, any given Norseman who had descendants. William lived in the 11th century, so lets use 1063 for our start date. In genealogy, traditional calculations of generations use 25 years per generation. 2013 - 1063 = 950 years. Divided by 25 equals 38 generations.

This is important for two reasons. 32 Generations is the point where the number of theoretical ancestors in the 32nd generation (2^32 or 4,294,967,296) is larger than the number of base pairs (in the 3 billion range) in the human genome. In other words, 32 generations is the point where descent is (theoretically) statistically meaningless, and your genetic makeup is just as related to your ancestor as it would be to any random person you aren't descended from and was alive at that time.

It is important for a second reason because 2^38 equals 274,877,906,944. Yes, that is 275 Billion. That is the number of theoretical descendants of the old Bastard, assuming 2 children per generation (and for the record, he had ten known issue, so I'm being conservative in my estimates). Obviously, there is a LOT of closed loops there to account for the fact this number is orders of magnitude above the total number of people who have ever lived.

Even if we assume something like 90 percent of the lines go into dead ends before reaching modern times (which most genealogists wouldn't support anyways, if anything, it is the opposite), that's still 27,500,000,000 living descendants right now, so many times over what the current world population is.

So what is my point here? It is that you don't need to go very far back before claiming anything special about your ancestry becomes meaningless. Anyone who is of European ancestry is almost certainly descended from Charlemagne for instance, and probably William I as well. In fact, you can find estimates that place the most recent common ancestor of Europeans as having lived only 600 years ago (possibly a bit optimistic).

Now math is not exactly my forte, but if I visualize it correctly, if the population of the world is ~7 billion, and the theoretical descendants that this guy has now is 274,877,906,944, that is 40 theoretical descendants who should exist for every person currently alive. So if every person now alive can claim descent from him, they should, in theory, be able to trace back through 40 different paths, right?

If 1/10th of the world population is descended from him, the average descendant would be able to do it through 400 different paths! Aside from just being an interesting exercise in how closely we are related, this also relates back to the 32 generation cut off point. Because there are so many "closed loops", as I think of them, it means that that cut off point potentially gets pushed back.

Also, going back only a few more generations, to Charlemagne, we are getting into numbers in the trillions by the way.

Now anyways, to get back onto the topic, yes, as the Queen is a direct descendent of William the Conqueror, himself a descendant of the Norse, she would have ancestry of the Norse too, but as I pointed out, there are two huge asterisks. First, it is so far back as to be nearly genetically meaningless, as I pointed out. The second, and more important factor, is that what separates the Queen from everyone else of European descent isn't that she descended from these royal figures and that most people didn't, but rather than because of her specific line of descent being notable, we have the records of it still, while most people simply lack the written proof.

*Also, obviously, I do not take infidelity or adoption into account here, and take paternity at face value. If William kept getting cuckolded, and none of his kids were actually his, obviously none of this still applies.