You may bow the next time you see me

Did you know that I (probably) have royal blood in me. I can’t flaunt it too much, though, because you probably do too. Yup, according to the Washington Post, we’re all royal:

Even without a documented connection to a notable forebear, experts say, the odds are virtually 100 percent that every person on Earth is descended from one royal personage or another.

“Millions of people have provable descents from medieval monarchs,” said Mark Humphrys, a genealogy enthusiast and professor of computer science at Dublin City University in Ireland. “The number of people with unprovable descents must be massive.”

By the same token, for every king in a person’s family tree there are thousands and thousands of people whose births, lives and deaths went completely unrecorded by history. We’ll never know about them, because until recently vital records were rare for all but the noble classes.

It works the other way, too. Anybody who had children more than a few hundred years ago is likely to have millions of descendants today, quite a few of them famous.

I’d polish the sceptre and orb right now, but I can’t find them under the piles of unfolded laundry.