The blood of kings flows through my veins!  I’m pretty sure that this means I get to have a completely superfulous sex scene with Melisandre before she sacrifices me to her red god. (Game of Thrones reference.)

Don’t worry, you get to have sex with Melisandre too.  It turns out that we’re all related to Charlemagne.  If you can claim European heritage at least.  If you go back a little farther than Charlemagne to 1000 BC, we’re all family!  Not just Europeans.  Everyone.  The Native American hunting the Great Plains in 1000 BC?  He’s family.  The African migrating across the Serengeti in 1000 BC?  She’s family.  Every person that was alive in 1000 BC and managed to sprout a family tree that is still growing today is related to you.  Every.  Single.  One.  That is amazing!

And before you start worrying about how much incest you’re having, fear not, you share none of the same genes from those ancestors.  You have no more in common (genetically) with those ancestors than you do that random stranger you saw on the train.  In fact, you only have to go 14 generations back to have a statistical zero percent chance of sharing any genes at all with an ancestor.  So much for leaving behind a lasting legacy.

I could never come up with a better closing paragraph than the one in the above linked article so I’ll just quote it here:

But while genetics doesn’t reflect much of our imagined genealogical uniqueness, it’s shown that we’re more closely tied to our species as a whole than we might have realized. We’re all part of this enormous human fabric, full of fascinating tendencies and bizarre biochemistry. And research is revealing more and more about humanity as a whole and our incredibly beautiful, incredibly unlikely perch in the universe. That’s a tradition to be proud of.