We are all descended from kings, according to a recent MSNBC article [1] about experts who have combined computer science and genealogy.
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.”
By the same token, for every king in a person’s family tree there are thousands and thousands of nobodies whose births, deaths and lives went completely unrecorded by history. We’ll never know about them, because until recently vital records were a rarity for all but the noble classes.
So just maybe . . . we should all start trying to treat everyone else like descendants of kings and queens. If nothing else works, perhaps this is something else for our legislators to think about when they cut off medicaid for the working poor. They should consider that they are cutting off medicaid to the descendants of royalty.
Islam probably runs in the family, too.
Humphrys estimates that Muhammad, the founder of Islam, appears on the family tree of every person in the Western world.
Let this be a word of caution for Christian fundamentalists who slam Islam [2] in knee jerk fashion.
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