My question is, how is this possible? Is it just a numbers game where if you go back far enough these facts aren’t surprising?
Lets say you take a group of 43 white men in the US, you can go as far as to include the stipulations for being a president (Natural born citizen, over the age of 35 etc) and even include average salary.
What are the chances that all of these men have a similar family history as all the former Presidents?
The website also says that 33 of the past presidents have been ancestors of two people, both Alfred the Great, King of England, and Charlemagne.
What percentage of people eligible for President are also related to these two people? Or even just one?
I’m nobody, but descended from Henry II, and cousin to FDR (through the Delanos), Lady Diana, and Winston Churchill. Believe me, I’m pretty far removed from royalty or “old money”, and I suspect many, many Americans have a valid claim to some royal ancestry.
Any website that quotes David Icke as some sort of authority automatically needs to be treated sceptically. This is in fact just a variation on the ‘Most royal candidate theory’, which Wikipedia rightly debunks. That entry gives examples of Presidents who are not known to have royal ancestors - or indeed, in some cases, not many documented ancestors of any sort.
Now, having said that, it is true that many US Presidents do have royal descents. As indeed do very many other Americans. It’s really not that remarkable.
It is also worth saying that US Presidents are not exactly a random cross-section of the US population. They do tend to have English ancestors, which, although not any more likely to be descended from royalty, can be a bit easier to document.
Once you get back that far, you’re going to include nearly everyone of European ancestry (and considering that most blacks and many American Indians in the US have some European ancestry, that will include most of them as well as whites). Past about 1000 years ago most lineages in a region as small as Europe will coalesce. We don’t don’t realize this because most people can’t trace their ancestry back more than a few hundred years at best.
Just as follow-up on coalescence times for lineages, if we conservatively assume that a human generation is about 25 years, there are four generations per century, or about 40 generations in 1000 years. This means that 1000 years ago each of us would have had 2[sup]40[/sup] ancestors, or over one trillion if they were all unique. Obviously, since since the population of Europe was orders of magnitude less, the family trees of most people must overlap very extensively. There was certainly enough interchange of individuals within Europe, even between such relatively distant areas as Scandinavia and the Mediterrean, to guarantee that most people alive in 1000 AD who left any descendants are ancestors of all people of European ancestry today.