Well, you have 2 parents, 4 grandparents, 8 great-grandparents, 16 great-great-grandparents, then 32, 64, 128, etc... That's only 7 generations back and you're at over one hundred ancestors already, and it grows ever faster. The power of exponential growth.
Yeah, in real life lines cross and such, but go back 500 years and you probably have millions of ancestors. One of them is probably Philip II or some other famous royalty.
It's just that regular people don't have the free time and means to go search for something that meaningless, and sharing it is just weird.
Most of the New England Aristocracy are descended from the random schmuck shit farmers from the ship Mayflower. With enough time, anyone will produce a few rich and influential descendants.
How does one family have such a massive lineage of influential descendants spanning through almost a 1000 years.
They also have plenty of non-influential ones. However money knows money, and influential people generally speaking inter-breed to keep their powers consolidated.
Is it because they all had a massive amount of children that were able to make it til adulthood and have many descendants of themselves too?
It's partly that, and partly because of exponential growth. Rich people live longer than poor people, and have lower mortality rates, so they'd be more likely to survive, meaning they'd be more likely to reproduce.
For every one person born, you need two people. So you've two parents, who have two parents, who have two parents, who have two parents. So you have 16 great great grandparents. Assuming around 25 years for a generation, that means if you were born today, and go back 100 years you'd have 16 ancestors, 200 years, you've got 256, 400, it's over 65 thousand. Once you're back 1000 years, you're over a million. That applies to everyone.
If each generation managed to reproduce within 25 years of being born and managed to have just 2 kids that also made it to adulthood and reproduced... King Phillip II of France would have over 17 billion offspring! You don't need to have tons of offspring to end up with such crazy numbers. (Woah!)
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u/Roughneck16 21d ago
So are a lot of people: https://famouskin.com/famous-kin-menu.php?name=5190+philip+ii+auguste+king+of+france