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Originally Posted by kiterunner
A pretty silly assumption! I read an article debunking this kind of thing recently, I wonder whether I can find it...
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I certainly wouldn't be able to find it now, but I remember reading an article which mentioned that almost every line of Prince Charles's ancestry had been traced back 20 generations or so, and compared the theoretical number of ancestors at that point (assuming doubling every generation) with the actual number of distinct individuals. I can't remember the exact numbers, but the number of different ancestors at that generation was MUCH smaller - I think only something like 1/20 of the number with no intermarrying. If we estimate that over the course of 500 years, intermarriages reduce the total number of descendants by a factor of 20 or so, the radio statistician's estimate of 1,000,000 becomes a more believable 50,000.
To illustrate OC's point, there's a certain fairly well known individual who lived a century or so after Richard III and has no living descendants. He had three children and four grandchildren, but only one of the grandchildren lived long enough to marry, and she bore no children so his bloodline ended with her death, only 54 years after his own.