Tuesday, March 25, 2014

A Family Tree of all Mankind - part 4

Inbreeding.
      Let's pick an extreme case of royalty inbreeding. If Anna Gevedon's tree made you cringe, observe the pedigree of King Charles II of Spain, last of the Habsburg dynasty:

 
      This amount of inbreeding was pretty incredible. The effects were so bad that Charles II was handicapped from genetic mutations. It's no coincidence he was the LAST of the Habsburg dynasty to rule. It just doesn't get any worse than this. Or does it? Turns out it does. Here is a pedigree of an ancient Egyptian royal line that I have picked out of the tree. It begins with 155th great-grandfather Unas (Oenas), Pharaoh of Egypt in 2375 BC and shows the next 20 descending generations within the central ruling family, ending with Senebtisi Queen of Egypt in about 1800 BC who was our 135th great grandmother. (Quick math check for plausibility: 3800 years / 137 = 27.7 years per generation). Remember I said the average was 28.5. This was about 4000 years ago and as King of Egypt, you were a God literally. It was traditional to marry your half-sister to keep your divinity in the family, and this happened for many generations.

 
      There are also many biblical examples of incestuous relationships - in particular, the well known story of Lot (tree link) in Chapter Genesis of the tree. But compared to what we've just seen within the royal dynasties of ancient Egypt, none of that really has much shock value in comparison.

Continued on page 5.
page 1,2,3,4,5,6,7,8,9 page

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