Welcome to Maid Spin, the personal website of iklone. I write about about otaku culture as well as history, philosophy and mythology.
My interests range from anime & programming to mediaevalism & navigation. Hopefully something on this site will interest you.
I'm a devotee of the late '90s / early '00s era of anime, as well as a steadfast lover of maids. My favourite anime is Mahoromatic. I also love the works of Tomino and old Gainax.
To contact me see my contact page.
I really enjoy tracing back the ancestors of famous figures on Wikipedia. For many famous people, particularly aristocracy, you can repeatedly click on the link to their father or mother nearly indefinitely, or at least until hitting a dead end and reversing to find a more fruitful route back in time. Starting from King Charles, for example, you can reach Mohammed, the Norse God Freyr and a minor Roman politician from Gaul named "Afranius Syagrius". Of course Charles has probably the most extensive genealogy available out of anyone alive, but with a bit of digging you can link many people somewhere into that same tree and thus to those same ancestors. That is to say, if you are descended in any way from a minor European noble house (which you probably are if you're European), then you can also link yourself back to Mohammed, Freyr and Mr Syagrius. I think people misunderstand the numbers involved when thinking about ancestry: since your number of theoretical ancestors grows by a function of 2^n it grows exponentially, meaning if you go back 10 generations you only have around 1000 ancestors, but if you go back 10 more you have over a million, and 10 more over a billion which was much more than the number of humans alive at that time.
Here I plotted the historical population of Earth with the maximum theoretical number of ancestors (based on an average generation length of 30 years). You can see that your ancestors as a percentage of the world population is virtually 0% all the way back until 1300AD, but by 1000AD it has eclipsed the number of people that have ever been born. If we zoom in, the year of crossing is circa 1180AD, meaning that it is theoretically possible that you could have a family tree stretching back to that year without a single case of crossbreeding or "incest". But obviously this is far from the case. In reality the orange line would increase at a much reduced rate due to the same people popping up again and again in your genetic history. This is I suppose a form of inbreeding, but any biological disadvantages this brings disappear after aonly a few generations, and any genetic effect on descendents at all is minimal after a dozen odd generations.
However when delving into genealogy some faces pop up more than others. These "node" individuals are people (always men) that had a combination of a few traits that have propelled their genes to superstardom. So in order to promulgate your genes to the widest population as possible these may be rules to live by. Firstly and most vitally, have as many children as possible. That one should be self-explanatory. Secondly: be a man. A woman is fertile for maybe 30yrs, meaning that she could theoretically get through 40 full terms of pregnancy. However a man could sire as many children as that in a week. It is estimated that Genghis Khan was the human with the most children that ever lived, with some (zealous) historians giving an upper range of nearly one thousand children across the entire continent of Asia. While this is an extreme outlier, many powerful men of mediaeval Europe would have twenty or thirty children (with liberal use of court concubines of course). Lastly you need to persuade your children to also have as many children as they possibly can. Obviously if you and your 3000 children all die in a housefire your line ends there, so raising virile offspring is just as important as your own actions. In this case I'd like to draw attention to a group of men active around the 9th/10th century, the knights of the court of Charlemagne. This small group of men have had arguably the greatest genetic effect on Europe than any other. Characters such as Sir Welf or Sir Billung whose actual deeds are nearly forgotten still stand as the foundation points for so many of the great families of Europe: after all if you can't trace your lineage back to the court of Charlemagne who even are you? From the Habsburgs to the Hohenzollerns to the Bourbons to the Windsors, all can trace their house to a retainer of Charlemagne. Other central groups of men in European genealogy are the mediaeval Kings of France who, as the preeminent military power in mediaeval Europe, commonly married their daughters off to the six corners of the known world. And maybe less expectantly the Grand Princes of Kiev also take a starring position, such as the Grand Prince Yaroslav the Wise who had daughters married to the Kings of Norway, Hungary, France and England simultaneously.
Occasionally commoners (usually American) boast of having traced their ancestry back to such figures as Charlemagne, but genealogical scholars estimate that almost everyone of European heritage descends directly from one of Charlemagne's close retainers (>99%), with an estimated 90% being directly descended from the Emperor himself. This tracks with my graph above, with Charlemagne living a few centuries before that explosion of potential ancestors. So while discovering your descent from him is surely a commendable achievement, it is nothing out of the ordinary. In fact it is very likely that almost everyone of European descent is descended from the vast majority of everyone who lived and bred in Europe at that time, and at any time before. You are, for example, most certainly descended from basically every citizen of Rome from Romulus to Odoacer.
