A Brief History of Everyone who Ever Lived: The Stories in Our Genes by Rutherford Adam

Author:Rutherford, Adam [Rutherford, Adam]
Language: eng
Format: azw3, epub
Publisher: Orion
Published: 2016-09-08T04:00:00+00:00

1 who was not particularly short: this is probably a mistranslation of Pepin le Bref, or ‘the younger’. Charlemagne himself was tall; his tibia was recently measured to be seventeen inches, which means he was at least 5´10˝, and maybe as much as 6´4˝. His male contemporaries were on average 5´6˝.

2 This was the first documented foreskin of Christ, though over the years there have been at least eighteen, all over the world, in all sorts of ceremonies. One seventeenth-century scholar, the Vatican librarian Leo Allatius, suggested in a treatise that Jesus’ foreskin ascended into the heavens to become the rings of Saturn. Support for this argument is stretched thin.

3 As reported by University College Dublin on awarding Christopher Lee Honorary Life Membership of their Law Society in 2011.

4 This claim is built on unsteady foundations in itself. The superlative genetic genealogist Debbie Kennett thoroughly deconstructed the assertion, which is based on the type of mitochondrial DNA that Prince William bears, as sampled in one of his cousins from the same maternal lineage. This DNA is a fairly rare type, and may or may not be associated with India. But because the data was not published in a scientific journal, instead simply injected into a newspaper without the scrutiny of peer review, it’s impossible for us to know. Debbie Kennett, who is thorough and knowledgeable, and very well respected in the genealogy community, concluded that The Times ‘has compromised its integrity by publishing an advertorial’.

5 On a family pedigree, death is represented by a diagonal line, top right to bottom left, as depicted on the cover.

6 Many people have driven this exciting endeavour forward, and I haven’t specified who did what above in this truly impressive project. Philippa Langley from the Richard III Society instigated the search, Richard Buckley headed the dig and coordinated the project overall, Turi King led on the genetics, Jo Appleby the osteoarchaeology, John Ashdown-Hill the identification of Richard’s descendants. Here is a full list of the authors on the scientific publication entitled ‘Identification of the remains of King Richard III’ (2014): Turi King, Gloria Gonzalez Fortes, Patricia Balaresque, Mark Thomas, David Balding, Pierpaolo Maisano Delser, Rita Neumann, Walther Parson, Michael Knapp, Susan Walsh, Laure Tonasso, John Holt, Manfred Kayser, Jo Appleby, Peter Forster, David Ekserdjian, Michael Hofreiter and Kevin Schürer.

7 The sharp-eyed will note that this Y chromosome mismatch implies that the false paternity might illegitimize the Tudors’ claim to the throne. Where the break occurred is unknown, and could only be found by digging up a lot of bodies from John of Gaunt (1340–99, the last common ancestor of both Richard III and Henry VII) to the present. Nevertheless, technically, as the Windsors are directly descended from the Tudors, the British Monarchy may yet turn out to be built on a falsehood, albeit a very old one. Kevin Schürer pointed out to the Guardian at the time that the ‘Tudors took the crown because they killed Richard at the Battle of Bosworth in 1485, not because they could prove the blood royal flowed through their veins.

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