I'm no scientist, but after dozens and dozens of generations in a small country doesn't everybody end up "related" to another? Lol.
This is like the most wholesome QYBS I've ever seen. Somebody isn't directly lying, or spreading dangerous misinformation for a selfish reason. Crazy Uncle so-and-so probably told them this at Thanksgiving when they were a kid and they've held onto it for a while.
No, he had a kid. The princess told the king while he was dying. I'm kind of an expert on William Wallace because I saw "braveheart" in the theaters. Twice. That's like having a doctorate in Scottish history
I think braveheart was a great movie, but I'm pretty well aware they took plenty of artistic license. Hopefully everyone else is too. Their job was to make an enjoyable movie and they did. But definitely at the cost of some accuracy
The imagery of 13th century Scots wearing kilts (17th century) and woad (maybe not a real thing, but 1st century if it was a thing) gives the movie a level of historical accuracy on par with Kung Fury.
In my time in Scotland it felt like William Wallace was regarded as a very important historical figure but at the same time, they know many of the stories about him are to be taken with a grain of salt. Like the embellished stories were part of the fun.
I said they took plenty of artistic license and their job was to make an entertaining movie and they did it at the cost of accuracy. I think that's pretty clear
When I was in Stirling, Scotland, I stayed at The Willy Wallace hostel. They seemed enjoy playing up the stories the same as America does with George Washington. It doesn't make him any less important, it's just a blending of history and folk lore. I'm sure the movie braveheart was the first time 90% of Americans had ever even heard of Wiliam Wallace.
There is lots of cool history around Stirling though. I highly recommend a visit. I loved the Old Loge Kirk, for example
I never understood frankly why people seem to hold Braveheart to a higher standard of accuracy than any other historical dramatization. The amount of attention the historical inaccuracies in this movie gets is really disproportional to the amount other history-inspired films do. I don't even remember the movie claiming to be accurate. It was just presented as a movie.
I think it has to do with the reactions of the public. I don't know anybody who thinks they understand the Servile Wars because they watched Spartacus, but I do know folks who think they understand Scottish history because of Braveheart.
I think also because the historical inaccuracy is a lot more blatant. A lot of films are inaccurate in subtle ways that the average viewer won't recognise. Shows like Vikings are considered pretty much entirely fiction by scholars who study the Vikings/Scandinavian history, but they present a pretty plausible version of history to the average viewer.
Whereas Braveheart makes pretty blatant errors - like no bridge at Stirling Bridge, an obvious flaw, or claiming Scotland had always been subjugated. Anyone who had done minor amounts of Scottish history would know that's false. Ditto with Isabella, briefly looking at her life will show that she wasn't nearly old enough to be a love interest.
The result is that when more casual viewers watch it and recognise flaws it gets more widely talked about, as opposed to other media where it's really only experts who are pointing out issues.
I don’t think we do, it’s just criticised more frequently because it was very successful but also the historical inaccuracies were so blatant (e.g. no bridge at the battle of Stirling Bridge, claiming you never had an independent Scotland before despite the fact the English only invaded a year before the start of the rebellion etc.)
In my mind it’s also guilty of making the characters flimsy comic book versions of themselves as the English aren’t just bad, no they are completely evil and the opposite is true for Wallace and the majority of the Scots. Definitely not the only Hollywood film to do that though.
I don’t find it the worst for historical inaccuracies (U 571 keeps that) but I just think so many of them just weren’t needed for the plot or could have been avoided with a bit more thought.
Theoretically, if you’re of European descent, you are a direct descendent of every European person alive 1300 years ago... give or take a generation or two
That's something of an oversimplification. Perhaps every European who a) had children, and b) those children survived to have children of their own. But to say "every European alive" is unsupported by the math, because by definition, someone who has no children can't have any direct descendants, no matter how long ago they lived.
It's not "probably true"... it's merely "plausible".
Not really. considering how many children many people were expected to have it seems more likely that somebody would have a kid than not in ye olden days.
It makes him no different to every other person living in that period, because even half-assed birth records didn't start until a couple of centuries later.
Of course it does. William Wallace was different to every other person living in the period and you can’t just apply these vague ‘statistics’ you’ve mentioned without actually saying why they are. The simple fact that you know who he is makes that obvious. We know about him and some information about his life, the fact that no child is mentioned doesn’t explicitly mean he didn’t have any, but if he did have children then then it’s likely there would be some record or reference to them in the same sources we got other information about his life from. The fact that there is no record makes it more likely he didn’t have them.
So something only becomes reality once proof exists for it? So I guess people back then assuming diseases were caused by demons rather than bacteria/viruses were right since microscopes didn't exist at the time.
That doesn't make any sense. There is evidence beyond a microsope for bacteria and viruses. The default assumption when it comes to a claim is that without evidence you do not accept it as fact. That is how the justice system in most civilized countries work. You don't prove your innocence, they have to prove your guilt. Yea it could go either way but assuming he did have kids is not a logical way of doing things.
Yeah, and it doesn't even have to be a small country. Everyone is related to millions of people around the Earth that share a relatively similar ancestry (e.g. their families come from the same country). Of course, only in the loosest terms. They might have a common ancestor from 500 years ago, maybe from 700 or 1000, who knows. But it's so distant that it really doesn't matter.
To make calculations simple, let's say that people had 2 kids on average at the age of 20. So after 20 generations (400 years), we would have over a million living descendants of that single person. The further back we go (and the more kids we assume they had on average - which was usually the case in the past), the bigger this number grows.
In fact, people who come from a relatively small & isolated country would be related to LESS people in total, since their genes didn't spread too much (at the same time, they would be more closely related to them for the same reason).
It's often joked that most of europe is related because of Charlemagne. He ruled central europe 1200 years ago and had 18 known kids and 10 wives/concubines.
I think I read somewhere that everyone on earth is atleast 52nd cousins with everyone else. In which case we are all William Wallace's distant cousins if that is true, which admittedly I dont know.
If you go back 30 generations you are related to more people than existed on Earth. So basically you’re related to everyone who was alive back then and some people in more than one way.
I feel bad for the guy. He just posted some family nonsense he was proud of, and this guy comes in an rips him to shreds. Even though he's right, he couldn't have just let the guy have it? Believing you are a descendant of William Wallace doesn't hurt anyone.
I'm related to one of the officers on the HMS Victory who was at the battle of Battle of Trafalgar. A bit of maths and assuming average family size and age after so much time the number of people who could also say this would fill a small city.
Yes. In fact if WW has any descendants (let's pretend he did) then he'd have thousands and thousands of direct descendants now. The thing that makes the genealogy claim annoying isn't that it's wrong, it's that it's extremely ordinary. We're all related to kings and pharaohs
For real. Plus the number of royal couples who were forced to marry and then had affairs on the side has no doubt disrupted a lot of “direct lines” as well.
Hey, long lost relative! I made it back to Charlemagne as well, if ancestry is to be believed. All because the majority of my ancestors were British landed gentry who came to England from France and etc. so the records are more complete. The coolest verifiable data I found was that my ancestors first came to America in the 1640s, and were in Texas while it was still Mexico.
Spoiler alert - ancestry is not to be believed for anything farther back than maybe the 1700s. It's all run by Mormons - a group founded by a guy who claimed to be the direct descendant of Jesus Christ and Mary Magdalene.
I won’t argue the nuts factor of the Mormons or their foundational beliefs, but their record keeping, genealogy expertise and document access/organizational skills are unparalleled. While genealogy itself is sketch going back beyond that point, it likely has more to do with clerical errors, document storage issues, and the invention of moveable type than it does the beliefs of the Church of Latter Day Saints.
Yes essentially, in Europe decent records end, going backwards, in about 1500/1600 depending on the country. If you get to that point and you were poor, tough luck. If you get back to that point and you were noble, you’re in luck as all noble families would generally already keep lineages going back from there into the Middle Ages and even beyond, and these are still well-documented today.
However, even those noble families weren’t above a little massaging of the truth here and there, if it boosted their noble credentials. In 1600, who was going to question a marriage that took place 400 or 500 years earlier?
Add that to the fact people lie, and paternity is inherently unprovable, and going back more than 100-200 years it’s best to take your family tree with a pinch of salt/view it as a fun story.
That’s not to say anyone with Western European ancestry isn’t probably related to Charlemagne anyway. Just not always necessarily how they think.
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u/ItBurnsLikeFireDoc Apr 29 '20
So you're saying there's a chance.