The unsettling thing about everyone's family tree is there a lot more incest than anyone would be comfortable with in it. The various royal families of the world just wrote it down.
this post was submitted on 29 Apr 2026
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It's not incest when you get to the point where overlapping lines are mathematically impossible
Reminds me of when I played Fallout Shelter, I made a spreadsheet to keep track of all my vault dwellers' families.
With the population of a tiny town, it did not take very long at all for the whole vault to become one clan.
I kept one dude and like 5 women in the family room to populate the entire vault, then I would kick out people that didn't have the same last name and then eventually kicked out all the males so it was just a 200 dweller vault of sisters
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yeah, it's about 28 generations ago, if we assume a generation to be about 25 years, where the number of ancestors you would need to have for a family tree without overlaps becomes more than the number of people alive on earth at the time. 2^28^ is roughly the number of people alive on earth in the year 1326, which is 28×25 years ago. that's the theoretical limit of how far back you can go without someone fucking their cousin of some degree, and it requires an exceptionally well-traveled family
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At some point back, you are related to every human who was on earth.
At some point back you are (probably) related to every living thing on earth, and at the very least every animal and plant and fungus.
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feddit.uk
Yeah, I can see that.
But seriously, how much "incest" does the average family tree really have? And I'm drawing the line at great-grandparents, anything less than that is unrelated imo.
Royals were doing multiple generations of first-degree incest, that's on a completely different level from normal people.
There's probably lots of first and second cousins who married in centuries past, though even most royals usually didn't do as much inbreeding as the extreme examples like the ancient Egyptians and Habsburgs. It became pretty common to look for spouses all over the continent, that's why so many of the european royal families are related in various ways; arguably that means that they were probably less inbred than the average villager in most cases.
Well the guy who got cut off in the screenshot has quite a bit
Like I said, royals aren't normal people. See the fabled family tree of the Ptolemaic dynasty:
But that only works if you have a family fortune to protect. Normal people would rather spread their children around and increase their chances of survival.
Holy shit!
So for example: Cleopatra II was first married to Ptolemy VI, her brother, and had a daughter Cleopatra III. Then when Ptolemy VI died Cleopatra II was married to Ptolemy VIII, her other brother. Ptolemy VIII also took his niece Cleopatra III as his second wife.
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Honestly, a family history of inbreeding doesn't mean much for the individual so long as it's not directly involved in their own birth. The issue with inbreeding is that every family has a few rare recessive conditions that simply don't manifest because they're rare enough to never be shared with the other families that they're having kids with, but if 2 people from the same family have a kid, that kid is way more likely to end up with 2 broken copies of the gene and have the familial condition.
However, even if your own parent has both broken copies, they can only pass 1 to you, and if your other parent is from another family, they likely won't have the same condition, so they'll pass you a working copy guaranteed and you're good. It's certainly not ideal, because it does concentrate the broken genes over time in a family if inbreeding continues, but a family history of inbreeding isn't really much of a red flag health-wise if your own parents aren't related.
In pre-colonial Australia, population numbers were so low, a lot of groups had to invent marriage laws to preserve genetic diversity. There are various "skin grouping systems" (it's nothing to do with the colour of your skin) that say who you can marry, and the systems are designed to minimise cousin fucking and make you go travel to find a spouse so your clan will have plenty of fresh new genes and take good care of the old ones.
First Australians had a better understanding of genetics than European royals thousands of years ago.
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I’m kind of upset the Habsburg’s reply is cut off
I just checked out his twitter and this guy is so funny. Wish he would be on Mastodon though.
Not many branches on that tree I suspect
There are, they’re just inosculated
Very jaw-dropping reply
I know a lot of people hate these, but imho cut off pics like this are funny when the person has a notable or relevant name but the comment itself adds zero comedic value or takes away from the original point. It’s just a variation _____ has entered the chat
Most of the world uses the country they were born in. I've noticed Americans will claim they're "from"a country they have ancestry in, even if they've literally never even been there.
"I'm 16/32 Irish, 8/32 German, and 8/32 Native American, so I've to hate the Brits, drink a lot, and gamble."
And oddly enough, they’re never English…
Due to two ancestors at unequal levels of generations back, I've got some odd ratio like 3/128 Native American. In practice this means that I don't grow much of a beard and I tan before I burn, and not much else.
The way genes swap around isn't really consistent with the whole 'fractions' thing, so that's not too surprising I suppose
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While also shunning immigrants like lepers.
Sicilian Americans are crazy proud of their heritage... They neither speak Italian nor own passports.
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Back in the day it was a lot harder to move. People obviously did, but your great grandparents are about 80 years older then you. If you are are 40, then they might have been born in a time without planes and cars being pretty rarer. If you wanted to cross an ocean you took an ocean liner and most land travel was done on trains. Even those only became really big in the 1850s in many places in the Western world. Sure people moved, but it was somewhat rarer and a massive decision.
Also when 1 out of 16 did make a big move, then you still got a quite long history in that place.
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My great aunt's hobby for the past 40 years has been extended family geneology. Apparently before she started my (American) family thought we came from like two places, she's mucked that up and proved that we're total European mutts with at least 8 origin nations and also thrown at least one of the original supposed origins into question. She's found a slave-holder in our lineage, several failed homesteads in the pacific northwest, and multiple names on the monument at Ellis Island.
European mutts
That might be Czechs, the land has been traversed by countless nations in the past 2 millenia and the genetics reflect that. Still, racism is rampant... We did have Habsburg rulers, notably Rudolph II, but none of the major ones took advantage of the gene pool. Nowadays, there's lots of Ukrainians, Romani, Vietnamese and the current Head of Parliament is half-Japanese (the infamous anti-immigrant immigrant).
Sounds a lot like my 1st cousin twice removed. She and her mother used to go all over the country to court houses and libraries to get information and she self published her findings. Having been 101 in the early 2000s when she passed, she had some interesting stories. My favorites were the pranks that the young men in her home town would play. Like swapping the wheels on their wagon front for back on saturday night so when they went to church they were riding way up in the air, or dissassembling the outhouse and reassembling it upsidedown on the roof of the barn.
Speak for yourself, i've gone back to 1200 CE and they all come from the same areas of the UK. My tree is a stick.
Conan O'Brien is apparently 100% Irish
Johnny Knoxville's family has a significant level of inbreeding
You're in the company of both intellectuals and people who get knocked out by bulls
Genealogy is just an exponential choose your own adventure where nearly every chosen path is the man. It's retconning an entirely narrow slice of your history based on whom you want association. It's Your Storyline Plinko.
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Man the industrial revolution sure has domesticated a lot of us huh? There's a reason why the automobile and trains were this huge deal. Not to mention jet travel.
No it was not easy or safe to leave your villages. And When people talk about lineage, it's usually, but not always the paternal side.
Next time you travel somewhere, I want you to think about how it might be different if you had to take a sail boat, horse, or walk there. How difficult would it be? And how safe would you feel carrying a backpack filled with everything you needed to live, trade, and barter? No cell phone, no pay phones.
Would you still live where you currently do? Could you see you and your descendents living in one place for generations if traveling meant there was a high potential for accidents, robbery, or just taking a big chunk of your time.
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I don't really get this obsession some people have with their "origins". Like... why is it so important to trace your ancestors so you can say that a 3% of you is... idk... persian?
I just think it’s pretty cool. Geneology and the movement of populations is fascinating. My genetics are overwhelmingly from a particular part of the world, and it makes it interesting to read about history of that area and think, “Huh, so that’s something my ancestors went through.”
It’s not crucially important to know, and I haven’t sought out any DNA tests (I know what I know because a sibling took one.) It’s just interesting, especially to a nerd like me.
I may have worded it poorly. What you describe is understandable. What it's not is going to those lengths as to take dna tests to know the percentage of you is from each country.
It's good to know your ancestors, but do you really need to know how much of you is Irish to annunce it publicly as if it was something to brag about?
Ngl I have never met anyone who actually brags about their ancestry like you describe or like the internet portrays Americans on this topic. Mostly it’s just a neat thing to find out.
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When you open the mystery box, it's racism.
And if you peel back the layers and look inside, there is a subtle undercurrent of yet more racism.
But, if instead, you inspect the histories of powerful nations and understand the stories which have shaped the world we live in, it's not racism that wins out and makes everyone's life better, it's syncretism (literally, getting along with the Cretans).
So yeah, you're absolutely right to call it out.
Barbaric, savage, and uneducated people, who lead us inexorably into decline and dissolution, spend a lot of time worrying about their "origins" when instead we should be focused on something else.
I'd say part of it is about mortality and legacy, part is about belonging to a tribe, and at least a little bit is just thinking genealogy is neat.
Mortality: no matter what a person's faith and belief system might be, there is a drive to contribute being meaningful after death. A person's future line is directly rooted to their ancestry, and that heritage has a bearing on how one views their legacy.
Belonging: Why do many who are adopted search for their birth parents? Even if a person is in a loving and inclusive tribe, they still yearn for knowing more about their tribe and who else might be in it. There is an instinctive level of security in having a large group that can rally to you at a time of need. Family ties are historically a strong fallback to threats from outside the tribe
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What, why did they snip the Hapsburg out?
Look Into the Hapsburg family… 😀
Tap for spoiler
Their family tree is a circle
Not gonna lie, eduard, having a lot of fun with his last name lately.
Who knew posting was an inheritable trait.
I mostly reference 4 different ethnicities because I have grandparents whose families originate from 4 different countries.
My great grandparents and great-great grandparents all had children with families who also emigrated from the same country their own family did, and before that they were all living in their original countries, presumably having children with other people from those same countries.
It wasn't that long ago when, in America at least, people didn't often associate much with people outside of their own country of origin. Polish and Italian people were especially avoided from what I've heard, and those are both ethnicities of mine.
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I've seen 2 groups of people that have an interest in there family history: people confronted with mortality, either their own or that of a loved one; and people interested in history and research in general. The people that OOP is describing are more interested in an identity than they are genealogy.
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