And what we do know, doesn't necessarily mean what those searching for descent from antiquity think it means. All tracing of such descent assumes that pregnancies involved known paternity, whereas we know that in general, there is a lot of error in recorded paternities (one of the more interesting side effects of DNA sequencing, both in consumer offerings, and in medical and official use, is demonstration that far more children are not the children of their named or assumed father than was suspected). Add to that, the fact that you could potentially have, say, Charlemagne in your direct line of descent, and still have none of his genetic material in your makeup. This is so because at the remove of Charlemagne, you're 48, give or take a few, generations, removed from the trillions of leaves on your family tree, but you get roughly 1/2^-n of your DNA from an nth generation progenitor and have only 2^36th or so base pairs of DNA in your entire genome. So, Charlemagne can be your umpty-great grandfather, and yet you in be in no genetic sense, a descendent of Charlemagne.
In other words, past a dozen or so generations, any data we've got on bloodlines has a lousy signal to noise ratio for proving direct descent.
Non-genetic descent is actually much stronger than that even.
When genes are sexually recombined, they don't recombine randomly per-base pair, they're cut and recombined in big strips. The chromosomes actually only 'snip' in a small number of places.
This means that after a relatively small number of generations, it's quite easy to have no genes at all from one of your ancestors.
I don't recall the exact numbers but it's something like 8-12 generations where you start having serious numbers of ancestors with no genetic connection.
Of course. Absent recombination, you'd start having ancestors dropping out after only 5 generations. With recombination, it's a few more. I didn't make the argument that way, because when I have in the past, I get a bunch of "yeah, but ..." rebuttal. In addition to the complicated nature of recombination, there is the additional complication that when you get back 6 to 8 or more generations, the same progenitors generally start appearing in multiple branches of your family tree - sometimes in many, many branches. But it is nevertheless the most correct. We all probably have great, great, great, great, great, great grandparents from whom we have no genetic inheritance at all. Add a couple more greats, and it's a near certainty.
> far more children are not the children of their named or assumed father than was suspected
The origin of this factoid is one British study about paternity tests for fathers on some street. However, the methodology of that study was deeply flawed and the fathers self-selected (i.e. they already suspected they weren't the biological fathers). Later studies has put the rate of "false fatherhoods" at about 1%. https://www.iflscience.com/false-paternity-isnt-actually-wid...
I've never heard of the British study you propose being the source of my observation. But it doesn't matter. If we're talking about deep ancestry, like say tracing your lineage back to Charlemagne (which seems to be a popular anchor), you're talking about 40 to 50 "fathers" between the good old King and a modern descendent. If there is a 1% probability in each generation that the paternity recorded was wrong, then you're looking at at least a 1 in 3 chance that your paternity chain is broken. If the rate is even as high as 2%, it's 1 in 3 that the chain isn't broken. One break, of course, and your claim of descent is invalid.
I don't see how. Sure, if you had mitochondrial DNA from your long-dead male ancestors, you could suss out your true patrilineal line of descent, but it's extremely unlikely that such data is available. You might be able to get it by inference by analyzing the fanned-out descendents of a relatively recent putative paternal ancestor - back 8 or maybe ten generations, but even that's unusual. And, if you're targeting a specific ancestor, it requires an unbroken line of paternal descent - as soon as your path to, say, Henry VIII goes through a female descendent, at any generation, you've lost the Y chromosome relationship. Same argument applies with the sex roles reversed for females and mitchondrial inheritance. At ten generations back, you've got 1024 grandmother leaves on your tree. Only one of them is your mother's mother's .. mother's mother. At 20 generations (say, 500 years, so the actual age of Henry VIII), you've got a million grandmother or grandfather leaves on your tree, and only one is purely matrilineal, and one purely patrilineal. (That doesn't mean, of course, that you've got a million distinct grand^20 fathers - it'll be way less than that, because the some men will appear on many different leaves, and the same for mothers. But the odds that the path you claim to Henry VII is purely maternal or purely paternal are still very small.
Sure, but unbroken patrilineal or matrilineal lines of descent are rather improbable over such long times - any family that had only sons or only daughters breaks the line, and that's not particularly uncommon. Add some infidelity into the mix and it becomes even harder to believe.
These were totally different systems between the Roman era (or eras) and the catholic Western European system of nobility.
Even at the peak of the empire, it wasn’t like driving around in a modern nation state, there were all sorts of associated kingdoms and tribes within the borders you see in history books. In many ways the empire was like a franchise with local governors wielding varying power and independence.
As the empire declined, association with that state became less relevant, so they dropped the pageantry of being the great grandson of Marcus Whomeveritus. As the petty kings and nobility started consolidating and emerging as “legitimate” in a system, the “mists of antiquity” served to launder that your background descended from an usurper governor, tax farmer, or barbarian warlord.
In what I would think of as the "standard model" of history, one of the highest priorities for a new king is eliminating everyone who might theoretically be related to the old king.
It does seem to be a Chinese tradition (and I believe in quite a few other places) to pacify the old king and grant them a comfortable enough retirement, as they’ve already lost power. It’s probably less confrontational and somewhat satisfies all sides in the long run. Examples would be some kings during the Three Kingdom period, who all got some sort of honorary title in the conqueror’s kingdom.
We lost a lot of historical records between late antiquity and the early middle ages. Most devastating for Italy was probably the Gothic War.
Then the records that were in Constantinople were also lost, not only by the fall of Constantinople itself but also by the sacking of it by Christian crusaders.
Lots of records that could have shown such a descent are lost.
Now Confucius was an important historical figure.
It's not surprising that he is one of the few cases where an uninterrupted descent could be true. If Jesus or Caesar had a family line run into modern times or if the Papacy was hereditary, we might have such a line for Western civilization as well.
I don't think it is a fringe belief. I have not heard of such a consensus among "most scholars of antiquity." What are you basing that on? A discussion I heard in the past few years which mentions that is an open question is here: https://theness.com/neurologicablog/index.php/the-evidence-f...
The Wikipedia article [0] has a lot of quotes pointing to this. Even modern supporters of the theory, like Robert M. Price, recognize it as a fringe position within academia.
Of course, it is an open question in some sense, as the evidence is nowhere near as powerful as, say, Newton's laws of motion, or the existence of Julius Caesar.
True, but that's because history as a discipline has incredibly low standard of evidence. They collectively decided that since reliable evidence is often very difficult to produce, they will settle for what they can get. A lot of antique or even medieval historical figures are known from a single sentence in some chronicle written 100 years after their death.
Even the most ardent Christian biblical scholars admit the overwhelming majority of writings claimed to be 1st century are much later forgeries. They have picked out a few scraps they have not been able to prove were forged, and based everything on those.
But the most favored bit of positive evidence is a single paragraph that everybody agrees was badly doctored up. They have "reconstructed" what they think the original must have actually said. But the text before and after it would flow neatly one to the next without it.
Next best is a line in Paul where he mentions somebody is Jesus's brother.
Adam, Noah and Moses were only attested and believed to exist by groups living in the Kingdom of Judah.
For Moses, people have looked a lot for any kind of evidence that there was some significant Jewish presence in Egypt, or Egyptian migration to the area of Israel, and nothing of the kind has been found, either in Egyptian documents or in archaeological evidence - which is actually evidence of absence when expecting a significant population to have migrated that way. Further accounts from the books of Exodus and Deuteronomy, such as the battle of Jericho, have also been somewhat conclusively debunked (the city of Jericho hadn't existed, at least not worth walls, for a few hundred years before the time of the conquest is supposed to have taken place).
Similarly, we have looked long and hard for evidence of a massive flood that could have lent some credence to the story of Noah, and nothing of any significant magnitude was found for that time - and here, we know for sure that a flood would have left significant geological evidence, so we know the flood can't have existed.
Adam has so little information associated with him that it's hard to even define what it would have meant for him to exist. We do know for sure, based on DNA evidence, that there is no single father + mother pair from which all humans living today have sprung, definitely not anyone living anywhere near close to the Jewish account of Adam.
In contrast, the idea of a founder of the Christian sect, one who was killed under Pontius Pilate around the year 33, has no major evidence against it, and is a somewhat plausible account of how the Christian sect could have come to be. There are no sources asserting a different origin, and there are no sources that contradict the possibility that Pontius Pilate and the Jewish authorities would have punished someone behaving like Jesus did. So, the neutral position is to say that he may or may not have existed, we don't know.
If you further believe the biblical or non-biblical sources attesting to his existence, even if you think they are weak, you can even say that it's more likely that he existed than that he didn't.
No one who lived then and wrote anything about Jesus, including the (unknown) authors of the Gospels, ever claimed to have met Him.
We can be confident Paul existed, or anyway somebody we know of as Paul, who wrote his Letters. Likewise Homer, the Iliad. Tacitus, Pliny, Horace, Plato, Euripides. But there is nothing traceable to any Jesus. You certainly can choose to believe He existed, but objectively, the evidence is too thin to support it.
Funny thing about Noah's flood. The water is all still there. We call it the sea. Sea level rose 120 meters in the past 20,000 years, up until 8000 years ago. Many millions of square miles of what was rich river bottom land is now sea floor. People whose family had lived there for tens of thousands of years had to keep moving inland (where other people already lived!) as the sea swallowed their ancestral homes. For 12000 years. It must have made an impression.
In 1900, no historians thought Jesus was like Moses, Abraham, and Adam, made up from whole cloth. In 2000, some did. Today, more.
The scenario as I understand it is that Paul's writing came first. But to get a congregation to pay attention they found they had to invent a corporeal Jesus to have said their things, then apostles to have heard them, then a bio for where and when, and finally gospels to tell it in.
For those who object that such a thing wasn't done, consider Moses and, really, all of Genesis and Exodus. Iliad. Thor'n'Loki. It was not just done, but positively demanded.
Genealogists have worked out most American Presidents 800 years or so. A couple interesting facts include (1) about everyone one of them is at least 10th cousin to every other one and (2) a large fraction descend from King John of England. Probability suggests that after a millennium that that someone becomes a super-ancestor, i.e. everyone is descended from them, or no one is descended from them. Very little middle ground. (A lot of northwest European Americans probably have the same statistics as Presidents.)
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Descent_from_antiquity