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Archiver > GEN-MEDIEVAL > 1996-10 > 0844180988


From: Gordon Fisher <>
Subject: Re: DESCENDANTS OF CHARLEMAGNE-----HOW MANY?
Date: Tue, 1 Oct 1996 10:43:08 -0400


At 03:47 PM 9/30/96 GMT, you wrote:
>"R. Leutner" <> wrote:
>
>>Anyone who has played around with long lines would agree, I think, that
>>odds are very good that just about any contemporary W. Euro person likely
>>has a Charlemagne descent--it's hard to think of any population so
>>isolated as to be "immune." I wonder, though, what the odds really are
>>against significant numbers of such descents in non-Euro populations. I
>>grant them very uncommon in the Native American pool, likewise no doubt
>>Polynesian, Australian & NZ aboriginal, and some few others, I suppose,
>>but it is not difficult to imagine one or more descendants carrying the
>>line out the Silk Road and propagating it somewhere there, or from an Arab
>>homeland out to Malacca and beyond, particularly after the Crusades. And
>>only a single "carrier" is in theory needed, of course, much as old C.
>>Magnus was himself a singularity. There is, of course, an important
>>mathematical difference between 1200 years ago and, say, 800 years ago in
>>these matters, but still . . .
>>
>>That said, I don't know of any such -documented- descent (except
>>very recently generated ones, of course). Speculation welcome.
>
>I should think there is a significant portion of the African American
>population who have the blood of their white owners running in their
>veins. And since many (though not all) of the landowning Southern
>families descend from the English gentry, surely this would be a
>source for descent from Charlemagne. Of course, the challenge would
>be confirming which son of which family (a la Thomas Jefferson's
>situation with Sally Hemings) actually fathered children on which
>slavewoman, which could be more difficult than tracking down all of
>the illegitimates of Charlemagne himself ;-)
>
>
>
>G M Menzies
>
>=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=
>Se non e vero, e molto ben trovato
>=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=
>
>

It still seems to me that an undue amount of complete mixing, or
homogenization, is being assumed. That *some* African Americans have
genetic descent from Charlemagne seems to me to be very likely. That *all*,
or even *most* do, seems to me questionable. My experience with New England
and royal and other lines leads me to strongly suspect that families
"clump". That is, they tend to form isolated subpopulations. By
"isolated", I mean that they don't interbreed, and haven't since the time of
Charlemagne. (I leave aside the question of ultimate relationship based on
much earlier ancestors.)

What about all the people who were living at the time of Charmlemagne, in
their millions. Is everybody now living descended from each and every one
of those people? This seems to me to be an empirical questions, which can't
be settled by pure mathematics alone. I have nothing against pure
mathematics --- in fact, I'm a mathematician by profession. But I fail to
see how it is that the relatively large numbers arising from exponentiation
imply more or less complete mixing in populations.

Gordon Fisher

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