What The Furthest Back One Can Realistically Go?

[peter...@yahoo.ca]

The Adam & Eve thread has contained another thread about how far back the documentation takes you. Is the late 500s for European ancestry the limit or is it further back? Also, using scholarly conjecture, how much further can you possibly go in Europe?

My wife and I descend from Charlemagne. I understand that documentary evidence takes you back to the late 500s and that scholarly conjecture adds another 200 years taking you back to the late 300s. Is that the limit for European ancestry?

Let's not limit to Europe. Do other areas, like say China and Japan, but not limited to them, go back as far or further or not as far?

Peter D. A. Warwick

[Richard Smith]

On 27/04/16 11:37, peter...@yahoo.ca wrote:

> My wife and I descend from Charlemagne. I understand that
> documentary evidence takes you back to the late 500s and
> that scholarly conjecture adds another 200 years taking you
> back to the late 300s. Is that the limit for European ancestry?

As Stewart Baldwin has already said, documentary evidence takes you back
to Arnulf, Bishop of Metz, or his contemporary, Pépin of Landen, Mayor
of Palace in Austrasia, both of whom were born in the late 500s, perhaps
the 580s.

Beyond them, yes, there's a lot of scholarly conjecture, but I'm not
sure why you single out the 300s for where that stops. I think most
would agree that Settipani's works fall solidly under the description of
scholarly conjecture, and he outlines possible lines back to Augustus
and Pompey at the back of /Les ancêstres de Charlemagne/, and as I
understand it, their ancestries are known back some way. There is even
a highly speculative descent by Chico Doria going back to the 12th
Dynasty in Eygpt in about the 20th century BC, which arose from
discussion on this newsgroup; I would describe that as scholarly
conjecture, even though it's almost certainly wrong in many places.

Richard

[norenxaq via]

On Apr 27, 2016, at 4:20 AM, Richard Smith via wrote:
> There is even
> a highly speculative descent by Chico Doria going back to the 12th
> Dynasty in Eygpt in about the 20th century BC, which arose from
> discussion on this newsgroup; I would describe that as scholarly
> conjecture, even though it's almost certainly wrong in many places.
>
> Richard
>

this pharaonic ancestry has been decisively disproven

[norenxaq via]

both do

[Richard Smith]

Thank you for your helpful and informative post. Perhaps you'd care to
tell us which step has been decisively disproven?

Richard

[norenxaq via]

there was a discussion of this sevaral years ago that resulted in a pdf being placed online. which should still be somewhere. note: it was more than one connection that did not work

[Stewart Baldwin via]

On 4/27/2016 5:37 AM, peter1623a via wrote:
> The Adam & Eve thread has contained another thread about how far back the documentation takes you. Is the late 500s for European ancestry the limit or is it further back? Also, using scholarly conjecture, how much further can you possibly go in Europe?
>
> My wife and I descend from Charlemagne. I understand that documentary evidence takes you back to the late 500s and that scholarly conjecture adds another 200 years taking you back to the late 300s. Is that the limit for European ancestry?

This is a pretty ambiguous question. One person's "scholarly
conjecture" is another's "reckless guesswork," and it seems difficult to
define the terms with enough precision to get a reasonable answer to
your question. As a skeptic, it seems to me that this question more
often than not turns out to mean something like "To what extent do I
have to lower my standards of 'proof' in order to get the result that I
desire?"

The most common theme is the attempt to get a "Descent from Antiquity"
("DFA"), which means different things to different people, but to me
means tracing a line from the present back to one of the Hellenistic
dynasties of classical antiquity, which form a reasonably
well-documented connected genealogical "island" spanning a couple of
centuries. Unfortunately, the attempts to do this require many "dotted
lines" in the genealogical charts, making the chances that the entire
line is correct very slim. For example, five uncertain links each
having a probability of 2/3 (about 66.7%) of being correct gives you a
probability of about 13% that the entire line is correct, and the
examples I have seen have way more than five weak links.

Another approach would be to use what might be called "discontinuous
genealogy," where you try to prove descent from an individual without
documenting every single generation. Of course, a simple counting
argument shows that we can be 99+% certain that Charlemagne was
descended from Ptolemy I of Egypt, who had numerous descendants by the
first century BC, presumably including at least one ancestor of
Charlemagne. If we agree that this does not really count as genealogy,
we should insist that at the very least, the approximate path of such a
descent should be documented. The are some cases where a
"discontinuous" genealogical line can be regarded as well-documented,
such as when a person names a grandchild in a will without naming the
intervening generaton, or when person B is named as the legal heir of
person A in a document, and the existence of proven descendants of
person A proves that person B must also be a descendant of person A.
Less certain (but sometimes still believable) cases can involve the
inheritance of a title over several generations where the exact descent
is unknown, or statements by chroniclers that person A was a descendant
of person B.

Some conjectured lines are presented by giving dotted lines showing the
conjectures (often with very loose standards as to when a line is
"solid"), and then claiming that even if the line is not exactly correct
as shown, it is still "approximately" correct. This is similar to the
discontinuous scenario mentioned above. In some cases, such tables
might not be far from the truth, but the real problem in attempting long
lines of this type is that they usually involve one or more marriages
taking the line from one family to another. In this case, it is crucial
that the line actually pass through that marriage, and not through a
different line of that same family.

To me, the most convincing "disconnected" genealogy of this type would
involve the Bagratid kings of Georgia (who have traceable living
descendants), passing through marriage to what is apparently the "main"
line of the Armenian Mamikonids, and then by two other marriages through
the Gregorids and the Arsacid kings of Armenia, who seem to be descended
(in the same discontinuous sense) from the Arsacid kings of Parthia. If
the Arsacids were in fact one genealogical dynasty, which seems to be
the case (if you allow the possibility of occasional descent through
females), then you get a VERY disconnected, but at least somewhat
plausible, line from the present back to the late third century BC.
However, attempts to get an Arsacid marriage going back to one of the
Hellenistic dynasties are extremely shaky. Also, what makes this line
plausible is the marriage of the Bagratids into the main line of the
Mamikonids, making it plausible that the descent passes through the
crucial Mamikonid-Gregorid marriage. However, it is known that there
were Mamikonid branches which do not descend from this key marriage, and
the documentation of the suggested Gregorid-Arsacid link is also not
that good. To my knowledge, none of the typical early medieval European
lines from which many people of European lineage can trace descent have
a descent from the Mamikonids that can be regarded as probable, and even
those suggestions for such a descent which have I have seen go back to
obscure cadets who cannot be convincingly argued to descend from the
Mamikonid-Gregorid marriage.

Stewart Baldwin

[Olivier]

Have a look at :

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Descent_from_antiquity

[peter...@yahoo.ca]

Thanks for your very reasoned reply Stewart. I always appreciate your posts. I posed the question out of intellectual curiosity.

[taf]

On Sunday, May 1, 2016 at 2:25:28 AM UTC-7, Olivier wrote:
> Have a look at :
>
> http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Descent_from_antiquity

But note all of the flags at the top indicating the article isn't very good, by Wikipedia standards.

taf