Nefertiti, Confucius, Genghis Khan, and Charlemagne Are Almost Certainly on Your Family Tree

The answer was merely 600 years ago. Sometime at the end of the 13th century lived a man or woman from whom all Europeans could trace ancestry, if records permitted (which they don’t). If this sounds unlikely or weird, remember that this individual is one of thousands of lines of descent that you and everyone else has at this moment in time, and whoever this unknown individual was, they represent a tiny proportion of your total familial webbed pedigree. But if we could document the total family tree of everyone alive back through 600 years, among the impenetrable mess, everyone European alive would be able to select a line that would cross everyone else’s around the time of Richard II.