Living descendants of Mark Antony
antigonejournal.com
antigonejournal.com
To me the amazing thing is that they managed to hold on to both power and money for so long. It took 1800 years for them to lose power, and 200 years later they're still sending their princes to Princeton.
edit: sorry Princeton highschool, I've got to hand it to them that this high school essay is more well written and polished than anything I ever handed in..
That's not a plot twist. It's a strategy as old as civilization itself, probably older. It's mentioned right at the front of the piece:
> In Ancient Greek and Roman cultures, having a distinguished family lineage determined your social standing. This practice has continued to exist within hierarchical societies to this day. Furthermore, many royal houses throughout history have claimed descent from ancient ruling dynasties and from famous figures both demonstrably historical (Alexander the Great, for example) and mythical (such as Hercules, Venus or Aeneas) to solidify their monarchical claim.
It's entirely possible they are living descendants of Mark Antony, but if they are, so is every other person in the vicinity of the Mediterranean.
Yep, the good ol' not-so-humble-brag.
I wouldn’t be surprised if a large portion of the population of Italy were also descendants of Mark Antony, albeit without the famous lineage to prove it.
This is covered in Randall Munroe's (of XKCD fame) latest book - What If 2; chapter 33 "Ancestor Fraction"
Obviously a human who did not have any children cannot be the ancestor of anyone - this includes the circa 50% of humans who died during infancy, and the 25% of adult humans who did not have children.
Also, for some people who had children the line will die-out; if you have four children all of whom die in infancy, your line dies out. If none of your grand-children have children, your line dies out. Randall quotes a study which estimated that this applies to 40% of all people who ever had children.
So, taken together roughly 25% of all humans who were ever born went on to have children and form a part of the modern human 'ancestor web'.
In Summary: If you picked a random human of any age from the time of Mark Antony there is a roughly 25% they are an ancestor to all humans. If they are an adult that rises to 50%, and if they already have kids it rises to about 62.5%.
Humans didn’t use to mix geographically (hence different races).
And there’s isolated subgroups that didn’t mix or mixed much less (e.g. Jews in Europe)
There's also the mitochondrial DNA passed along female descandants.
https://www.newscientist.com/article/mg22029453-500-inbreedi...
> "“In the distant past, human populations were probably only in the thousands or at best tens of thousands, and lived locally, exchanging mates only with their nearest neighbours.”"
International shipping, and now, air travel, has changed this - the 20th century and the population boom have led to more genetic mixing than at any point in human history.
We have a pretty good sense from that of who did and who didn't get around.
It's surely the case that the vast majority of Japanese on Hokkaido are not descendants of Mark Anthony. On Kyshu, maybe, the Portuguese contributed some genes there.
We can really only be detailed about this with a Y chromosome for a man, or mitochondrial lineage for a woman, and that only covers the case of lineal descent.
Not only can we not determine with confidence who is or isn't a descendent, even given a complete DNA sequence we don't have: most of those descendents won't have any Mark Anthony DNA at all! Chromosomes are more chopped than sifted, if that makes sense, I'm going on memory here, but somewhere around the 12th generation, we start having phantom ancestors: they existed, but left no record in our genes.
My main point is that its becoming clear that many supposedly very isolated populations have in fact had gene mixture with outside groups in the not distant past and that there were large pre-modern migrations and mixing events.
One time I got drunk and made out with my second cousin who still lives on that same island. My friends and family who witnessed the course of events were merely amused and not at all disgusted.
Inbreeding ain’t going nowhere in coastal Norway!
My (not at all previously related) wife thinks I’m insane that I love telling this story.
The genetics of Rome's population at the beginning of the Common Era were almost identical to that of Anatolia's, but just after Antony this began to change significantly due to the migrations that followed the Roman Empire's expansion: https://news.stanford.edu/2019/11/07/genetic-history-rome/
https://www.theguardian.com/science/commentisfree/2015/may/2...
Genealogically, it means a family tree which is not a binary tree [1]. The measure is meaningful over a certain number of generations. Everyone is inbred over infinite generations, assuming a universal common ancestor. That doesn't sap the term of meaning.
Medically, we look at the coefficient of coancestry [2].
Practically, I think we trace back 3 to 4 generations, my source being grandparents (2) is a common word, great grandparents (3) less so but widely understood, and great great grandparents (4) being something few people keep track of.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Binary_tree
[2]https://link.springer.com/referenceworkentry/10.1007/978-1-4...
What next, we can defend "tall" being anywhere from 1mm to 9 feet because height is a continuum?
Words have meaning so they can be used for communication. If I use the word inbred to mean two siblings having a child and two partners sharing an ancestor 20 generations back, I'm not communicating anything when I use the word inbred.
And pointing out that closeness of ancestry is a continuum is not a defense of using that word in that manner.
I speculate that when times were hard for humans in the course of history, those who were better off were more likely to successfully raise kids to adulthood, who in turn had better chances of establishing their own families
https://waitbutwhy.com/2014/01/your-family-past-present-and-...
https://nautil.us/youre-descended-from-royalty-and-so-is-eve...
What? How so? Did we come out of thin air?
We're all descended from Adam, and Joseph of Aramathea.
The unusual thing is having a traced relation with royalty or stretching back this far.
Such records exist in Chinese culture, in particular in Taiwan and the diaspora, as they have not been interrupted before the Cultural Revolution.
https://www.nationalgeographic.org/projects/out-of-eden-walk...!
This would mean that a 2% infidelity rate would have a more than 50% chance of breaking this chain, although there would likely be other undocumented ones.
I thought that widespread genetic testing has shown it to be much higher than that.
Higher rates might be mythical. In any case, it's unclear what the definition should be. See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Non-paternity_event#Rates_of_n...
It's quite fun to imagine doing research on this. You could stand around outside a primary school with a clipboard at the end of the day and ask fathers whether they believe they are the biological parent of the child and fill in a form that looks like this:
[ ] Man with parental responsibity told me to fuck off.
[ ] Man with parental responsibity said: "Look at him, what do you fucking think?"
[ ] Man with parental responsibity told me it was none of my fucking business.
[ ] Man with parental responsibity punched me on the nose.
[ ] Other.
At the same time, testing was also not possible back then.
Is there any evidence for that? In one of David Attenborough's documentaries, he talks about that. Research showed that people are quick to point out that a baby looks like the father, even when the father isn't the biological father. The inference is that cuckolding is a common occurrence.
You're right that people would go to great lengths to ensure fidelity of the women, even executing them for infidelity. They wouldn't have bothered if cuckolding wasn't common. The recent movie "The Last Duel" was historically accurate in that it was a duel to the death over whether a knight's friend had sex with his wife or not.
1) the Ancient world was gravely brutal. Sex, Pregnancy and Fighting were more often used synonyms than most may realize today. Hard to tell how many children Mark Anthony knew he himself 'fathered', let alone us today. Slavery and serfdom was rife in/around Europe up to 1400s, and in parts up to as late as mid-1800s!
2) Bolsheviks were ruthless in removing the Tsar+family + opposition. it's highly unlikely they would've been so lean on such famous linage from little ancient Rome; they were full of paranoia.
Article's a great read though.
For this particular story none at all. Nothing.
China did not have a dark age and so descent from antiquity is relatively common there. According to https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Family_tree_of_Confucius_in_th... , 80 generations of the family of Confucius have been recorded.
What would qualify this as "proven" to you?
> My conclusion is that his younger sister, Queen Nana (AD 295–337), married King Mirian III of Caucasian Iberia (AD 290–362).
In a footnote he admits that the ancestry of the wife of Mirian III is unknown.
There's no such thing as a proven genealogy extending back so far. Such a proof cannot exist.
But as far as reasonably-well-documented claims go, going back to Saxon times is not even impressive on a worldwide basis.
I knew my great grandparents until their death when I was 18. My great great great grandparents would potentially view me as “their” descendants but I wonder how much further. Going back 8 or 10 generations means there are so many descendants (thousands?) that the relationship is meaningless.
Brave? I'm sure that the grunts in his army where much, much more likely to die than him (they were in a riskier position, he had better armour, weapons, training etc)
Examples.
Roma is Rome in English and Milano is Milan.
London is Londra in Italian but Manchester is Manchester and Liverpool is Liverpool.
Livorno (a small Italian town where English poets liked to spend their time) is Leghorn.
Aachen (a German city that used to be the residence of Charlemagne) is Acquisgrana in Italian.
Nobody has been translating city names anymore but Londra is going to stay. Aachen is not very famous but probably Acquisgrana is even less so. I should check current history books of schools.
> The city name is from Roman Colonia Florentia, "flowering colony," either literal or figurative, and became Old Italian Fiorenze, modern Italian Firenze.
https://italyinview.com/italian-places/italian-cities/floren... elaborates:
> The Romans were the founders of Florence. Realizing the importance of a thoroughfare towards the Po plain, Ceasar in 59 B.C. ordered the establishment of a colony on the north bank of the Arno. The foundation is thought to have taken place in the spring, during the Floral Games, or Ludi Florales: hence the name Florentia, which was given to the city. Flora was the goddess of flowers and gardens, and the mother of spring in Roman mythology. Tuscan dialect turned the Latin Florentia into Fiorenza — a name which is to be found on Renaissance frescoes, and which was later shortened to Firenze.
That I can follow.
> Florentia, [...] became Old Italian Fiorenze
Still lost. I know accents are thick and an ex used to wax poetic about the fluidity of names, especially at the intersection of thick regional accents and illiteracy. But this one is still a bit of a stretch.
It's Londres in French which seems related, I wonder where they came from though.
When you know that the French name is Anvers it makes a little more sense.
By the way, Leuven (Belgium) is Lovanio even if I hardly heard that translated name until they hosted the UCI World Championship in 2021.
They're not translated as much as they are derived from the same etymons used by the languages spoken there. Italian Acquisgrana or French Aix-la-Chapelle derive from Latin Aquis {capella, grana, villa}. The only properly official name most cities had throughout Europe was in Latin rather than any vernacular, including in areas where non-Romance languages were spoken such as German, English, Polish and so on.
That isn't the kind of thing that happens at a particular point in time. It's a process that takes hundreds of years.
We also use classical Latin names for pre-classical Romans who would have written their own names rather differently.