Inventing Glastonbury

It must come as a shock to woo-woos to find out that some of their favorite wooful phenomena were actually invented by humans for purely down-to-earth reasons.

Take, for example, the Ouija board.  A lot of paranormal enthusiasts claim that the Ouija board is some kind of portal to the spirit world -- and an equal number of religious types think it's the gateway to hell.  Using it, they say, is just asking to be possessed by an evil demon.  Unfortunately for both contentions, the Ouija board was invented as a parlor game by a toy manufacturer named Elijah Bond in 1890.  Even the name is made up -- Bond stuck together the French and German words for "yes" and decided it would make a catchy name.  Which it is.  Better than the words for "no," anyhow, because "Nonnein" sounds kind of silly.

So finding out that the Ouija board was invented purely to make money is a little deflating to those who think it's some kind of tool for accessing the supernatural.  Which makes me wonder how the woo-woos are going to deal with the claim by archaeologists that the hype over Glastonbury is a 12th-century fabrication.

[Image licensed under the Creative Commons IDS.photos from Tiverton, UK, Remains of Glastonbury Abbey, Glastonbury, Somerset (3049676967), CC BY-SA 2.0]

If you're not up to date with woo-woo mysticism and don't know what the deal is over Glastonbury, it's a town in England that is considered to be one of the most "spiritual" places in the world, right up there with Ayers Rock in Australia, Sedona, Arizona, and Salem, Massachusetts.  Supposedly, Glastonbury is the place where Joseph of Arimathea fled after Jesus's crucifixion, and when he got there he thrust his walking stick into the ground, where it took root and now flowers every Christmas.

The problem is, the Glastonbury Thorn doesn't flower at Christmas, it flowers in the spring, like most hawthorns.  No, the faithful say; that's because the current thorn isn't the real thing, which was cut down as an idolatrous image during the Puritan era following the English Civil War.  Even so, there are people who take the whole thing awfully seriously, which is why the current tree (planted in 1951) has been repeatedly vandalized.

Then there's the King Arthur connection, because Glastonbury Abbey is supposedly where the Once and Future King was buried after his death at the hands of his cousin Mordred in the Battle of Salisbury Plain.  There's even an inscription on a stone cross in the Abbey that allegedly has an inscription dating back to the fifth century, and which mentions King Arthur by name.

In addition to all this, or perhaps because of it, Glastonbury (or more specifically the hill Glastonbury Tor that stands nearby) has been identified as being the world's most powerful convergence of "ley lines," lines of spiritual force that allegedly encircle the globe.  "[T]he landscape as a whole," we're told, "is imbued with a beauty, mystique and numinescence which has made it well loved over many centuries, and the haunt of many advanced souls."

So with all of this romantic folklore surrounding the spot, it's no wonder that people make pilgrimages to Glastonbury every year.  Which makes a paper published by a group of archaeologists at the University of Reading all the more devastating.

Because the study has shown that all of the mystical trappings surrounding the place were the invention of some twelfth-century monks who were trying to find a way to raise money when their monastery burned down.

Archaeologist Roberta Gilchrist and her team have spent years looking at both the documents and the structures that supposedly play into the legend.  And she has concluded that after the fire, which occurred in 1184, some enterprising monks decided to cash in on the increasing popularity of the Arthurian mythology (Geoffrey of Monmouth's seminal Historia Regum Brittaniae had only been completed some 46 years earlier, and was still immensely influential).  So they started a rumor that Glastonbury was where Arthur was buried, and that he'd been buried there because it was where Joseph of Arimathea planted his walking stick.  "Look!" they said.  "There's a hawthorn tree up on that hill!  That's the ticket!"

And thus the legend of the Holy Thorn was begun.

[Nota bene: yes, I know twelfth-century monks wouldn't have used the phrase "that's the ticket."  However, considering that they would also have been speaking Early Middle English, I think I'm allowed some poetic license, here.]

Anyway, Gilchrist and her team said that the stone cross was also the product of the same enterprising brothers, and had been fabricated to resemble earlier Anglo-Saxon and Celtic stone crosses, with the clever addition of an inscription mentioning Arthur by name.  And when they rebuilt the monastery, they made sure to make it of materials, and in a style, that made it look far older than it actually was, so the pilgrims (and the profits) kept rolling in.

As they still do, lo unto this very day.

It's kind of unfortunate, really.  I've always loved the Arthurian legends -- I grew up with tales of Merlin and Gawain and Morgan le Fay and the rest of them, not to mention my discovery during my teen years of Monty Python and the Search for the Holy Grail, which led to Much Rejoicing.  The idea that the whole thing might be some twelfth-century hoax is kind of sad.

You have to wonder how all the woo-woos will respond.  My guess is, they won't.  They'll ignore the current study just like they've avoided anything remotely factual in the past, and keep on claiming that ley lines and the rest are real.  They haven't based anything on evidence yet, so why start now?

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As a biologist, I've usually thought of myself as immune to being grossed out.  But I have to admit I was a little shocked to find out that the human microbiome -- the collection of bacteria and fungi that live in and on us -- outnumber actual human cells by a factor of ten.

You read that right: if you counted up all the cells in and on the surface of your body, for every one human cell with human DNA, there'd be ten cells of microorganisms, coming from over a thousand different species.

And that's in healthy humans.  This idea that "bacteria = bad" is profoundly wrong; not only do a lot of bacteria perform useful functions, producing products like yogurt, cheese, and the familiar flavor and aroma of chocolate, they directly contribute to good health.  Anyone who has been on an antibiotic long-term knows that wiping out the beneficial bacteria in your gut can lead to some pretty unpleasant side effects; most current treatments for bacterial infections kill the good guys along with the bad, leading to an imbalance in your microbiome that can persist for months afterward.

In The Human Superorganism: How the Microbiome is Revolutionizing the Pursuit of a Healthy Life, microbiologist Rodney Dietert shows how a lot of debilitating diseases, from asthma to allergies to irritable bowel syndrome to the inflammation that is at the root of heart disease, might be attributable to disturbances in the body's microbiome.  His contention is that restoring the normal microbiome should be the first line of treatment for these diseases, not the medications that often throw the microbiome further out of whack.

His book is fascinating and controversial, but his reasoning (and the experimental research he draws upon) is stellar.  If you're interested in health-related topics, you should read The Human Superorganism.  You'll never look at your own body the same way again.

[Note:  if you purchase this book using the image/link below, part of the proceeds goes to support Skeptophilia!]

All in the family

Coming from the Wishful Thinking department, today we have a woman in Murrysville, Pennsylvania who claims she is the Virgin Mary's first cousin, 65 times removed.

I was sent the link to this story by a friend who knows my fascination with genealogy and my interest in goofy claims, and this certainly hits both pretty well.  In it, we read about Mary Beth Webb, who began her inquiry into her genealogy in 1999 shortly after her brother was diagnosed with terminal cancer.  Like most of us who have done genealogical research, Webb started with census and other vital records, and used online resources like Ancestry.com and Rootsweb.  But this evidently proved inadequate -- she began to run into dead ends, which genealogists call "brick walls."  I have several of these frustrating people in my own family tree, the most annoying of which is the direct paternal ancestor of my grandmother.  His name is recorded as John Scott in all of the records -- but a recent Y-DNA study of one of his patrilineal descendants proved beyond question that he was actually a Hamilton, allied to the Scottish Clan Hamilton of Raploch.  And interestingly... one of his grandsons was named Hamilton Scott, and a great-grandson was Hamilton Grim.

But we have been unable to find anything more about his origins, despite extensive research.

Perhaps, though, we should take a page from Webb's book.  Because when she became stymied by various long-dead ancestors, she adopted a novel method for researching her roots.  She simply asked her parents.

The "novel" part comes in because her parents were both dead at the time.

Fortunately for her, her cousin is a medium, and was happy to contact her parents for her, and (after his death) her brother.  And all three of the dear departed told her all sorts of details about her ancestors, because (after all) the whole lot of them were up in heaven with them.

I don't know if that'd work so well in my family.  I've got some seriously sketchy ancestry, including a guy who spent years in prison in New Jersey for "riot, poaching, and mischief," a Scottish dude who lost his soul to the devil in a game of cards, and a French military officer who almost got hanged for killing a guy he found in flagrante delicto with his wife.  So I might have better success if the medium tried contacting people down below, if you get my drift.

"Yes... great-great-great grandpa Jean-Pierre says to tell you hi, and to let you know you're a direct descendant of Attila the Hun.  Also, please send down an air conditioner and a six-pack of cold beer, because it's a bit toasty down here.  Thanks bunches."

But of course, Webb's relatives all were either nicer or luckier or both, so she got scads of heaven-sent information about her genealogy.  And after a bit of this kind of "research," she found out that she was a direct descendant of Joseph of Arimathea, who was allegedly the Virgin Mary's uncle.  According to Webb's calculations, this makes her Mary's first cousin 65 times removed.

The problem is, the whole thing about Descent From Antiquity (as genealogists refer to any claims of pre-medieval proven ancestry) is that the best historians don't consider much of it to be true, especially the European bit.  (There are, however, apparently people in China who can with a fair degree of certainty trace their ancestry back to Confucius, who was born over 2,500 years ago.  So that's kind of impressive.)

People of European and Middle Eastern descent, however, don't have it so lucky.  The time between the Fall of Rome and the beginning of the Medieval Age is seriously lacking in reliable documentation, and what we have in the way of such records stands a good chance of being (1) a forgery, or (2) a lie.  Or (3), both.  By the time the Medieval Age was in full swing, the Romans were looked upon as being a Golden Age, despite the fact that a good fraction of the nobility in ancient Rome seemed to have some major screws loose.  So there were lots of people claiming descent from the Emperors and Empresses to boost their own stature, with several proposed routes going the proconsul Flavius Afranius Syagrius, and thence to the Egyptian pharaohs and whatnot.

But some people one-up even Webb's claims, and trace their lineages all the way back to Adam and Eve.  I kid you not.  If you go into Rootsweb, you can do a search for people descended from Adam and Eve, and find thousands.

Now that's what I call descent from antiquity.

Sadly, even the descent from the Romans relies on poor historical research and lots of wishful thinking, as does Webb's claim to have proven descent from Joseph of Arimathea.  About as far back as anyone with European ancestry can reliably get is Charlemagne, which sounds cool but isn't because damn near everyone with European ancestry descends from him, because he was proficient at one other thing besides ruling most of Western Europe, which was shagging any women who were willing.

But honestly, that's really not that surprising.  Given the small size of the population back then, if you go back far enough (some geneticists say 1200 C.E. is sufficient), then you descend from everyone in your ancestral homeland who left descendants.  Put another way: prior to 1200 C. E., you can divide all of humanity into two groups; those who were the ancestors of most everyone of that particular ethnicity alive on the Earth today, and those who were the ancestors of no one.  So we're all cousins, really.  And if Joseph of Arimathea left progeny -- which no one knows for sure -- then chances are, Mary Beth Webb is his descendant.

But chances are so am I, and (if you have European or Middle Eastern ancestry), so are you.

But I don't know that because my dead relatives told me so, I just know it because of genetic studies and logic.  Which may be less cool, but is a damn sight more reliable than trying to get a direct line to great-great-great grandpa Jean-Pierre down in hell.

****************************************

These days, I think we all are looking around for reasons to feel optimistic -- and they seem woefully rare.  This is why this week's Skeptophilia book recommendation of the week is Hans Rosling's wonderful Factfulness: Ten Reasons We're Wrong About the World--and Why Things Are Better Than You Think.  

Rosling looks at the fascinating bias we have toward pessimism.  Especially when one or two things seem seriously amiss with the world, we tend to assume everything's falling apart.  He gives us the statistics on questions that many of us think we know the answers to -- such as:  What percentage of the world’s population lives in poverty, and has that percentage increased or decreased in the last fifty years?  How many girls in low-income countries will finish primary school this year, and once again, is the number rising or falling?  How has the number of deaths from natural disasters changed in the past century?

In each case, Rosling considers our intuitive answers, usually based on the doom-and-gloom prognostications of the media (who, after all, have an incentive to sensationalize information because it gets watchers and sells well with a lot of sponsors).  And what we find is that things are not as horrible as a lot of us might be inclined to believe.  Sure, there are some terrible things going on now, and especially in the past few months, there's a lot to be distressed about.  But Rosling's book gives you the big picture -- which, fortunately, is not as bleak as you might think.

[Note: if you purchase this book using the image/link below, part of the proceeds goes to support Skeptophilia!]

All in the family

In the latest from the Wishful Thinking department, we have a woman in Murrysville, Pennsylvania who claims she is the Virgin Mary's first cousin, 65 times removed.

Mary Beth Webb began her inquiry into her genealogy in 1999, shortly after her brother was diagnosed with terminal cancer.  Like most of us who have done genealogical research, Webb started with census and other vital records, and used online resources like Ancestry.com and Rootsweb.  But this evidently proved inadequate -- she began to run into dead ends, which genealogists call "brick walls."  I have several of these frustrating people in my own family tree, the most annoying of which is the direct paternal ancestor of my grandmother.  His name is recorded as John Scott in all of the records -- but a recent Y-DNA study of one of his patrilineal descendants proved beyond question that he was actually a Hamilton, allied to the Scottish Clan Hamilton of Raploch.  And interestingly... two of his grandsons were named Hamilton Scott.

But we have been unable to find anything more about his origins, despite extensive research.

Perhaps, though, we should take a page from Webb's book.  Because when she became stymied by various long-dead ancestors, she adopted a novel method for researching her roots.  She simply asked her parents.

The "novel" part comes in because her parents were both dead at the time.

Fortunately for her, her cousin is a medium, and was happy to contact her parents for her, and (after his death) her brother.  And all three of the dear departed told her all sorts of details about her ancestors, because (after all) the whole lot of them were up in heaven with them.

I don't know if that'd work so well in my family.  I've got some seriously sketchy ancestry, including a guy who spent years in prison in New Jersey for "riot, poaching, and mischief," a Scottish dude who lost his soul to the devil in a game of cards, and a French military officer who very nearly got hanged for killing a guy he found in flagrante delicto with his wife.  So I might have better success if the medium tried contacting people down below, if you get my drift.

"Yes... great-great-great grandpa Jean-Pierre says to tell you hi, and to also to let you know you're a direct descendant of Attila the Hun.  Also, please send down an air conditioner, because it's a bit toasty down here.  Thanks bunches."

But of course, Webb's relatives all were either nicer or luckier or both, so she got scads of heaven-sent information about her genealogy.  And after a bit of this kind of "research," she found out that she was a direct descendant of Joseph of Arimathea, who was allegedly the Virgin Mary's uncle. According to Webb's calculations, this makes her Mary's first cousin 65 times removed.

The problem is, the whole thing about Descent From Antiquity (as genealogists refer to any claims of pre-medieval proven ancestry) is that the best historians don't consider any of it to be true.  The time between the Fall of Rome and the beginning of the Medieval Age was seriously lacking in reliable documentation, and what we have in the way of such records stands a good chance of being (1) a forgery, or (2) a lie.  Or (3), both.  By the time the Medieval Age was in full swing, the Romans were looked upon as being a Golden Age, despite the fact that a good fraction of the nobility in ancient Rome seemed to have some major screws loose.  So there were lots of people claiming descent from the Emperors and Empresses to boost their own stature, with several proposed routes going the proconsul Flavius Afranius Syagrius, and thence to the Egyptian pharaohs and whatnot.

But some people one-up even Webb's claims, and trace their lineages all the way back to Adam and Eve.  I kid you not. If you go into Rootsweb, you can do a search for people descended from Adam and Eve, and find thousands.

Now that's what I call descent from antiquity.

But, sadly, even the descent from the Romans relies on poor historical research and lots of wishful thinking, as does Webb's claim to have proven descent from Joseph of Arimathea.  About as far back as anyone with European ancestry can reliably get is Charlemagne, which sounds cool but isn't because damn near everyone with European ancestry descends from him, because he was proficient at one other thing besides ruling most of Western Europe, if you catch my meaning.

But honestly, that's really not that surprising.  Given the small size of the population back then, if you go back far enough (some geneticists say 1200 C.E. is sufficient), then you descend from everyone in your ancestral homeland who left descendants.  Put another way: prior to 1200 C. E., you can divide all of humanity into two groups; those who were the ancestors of most everyone alive on the Earth today, and those who were the ancestors of no one.  So we're all cousins, really.  And if Joseph of Arimathea left progeny -- which no one knows for sure -- then chances are, Mary Beth Webb is his descendant.

But chances are so am I, and (if you have European or Middle Eastern ancestry), so are you.

But I don't know that because my dead relatives told me so, I just know it because of genetic studies and logic.  Which may be less cool, but is a damn sight more reliable than trying to get a direct line to great-great-great grandpa Jean-Pierre down in hell.

***********************************

Back in 1989, the United States dodged a serious bullet.

One hundred wild monkeys were imported for experimental purposes, and housed in a laboratory facility in Reston, Virginia, outside of Washington DC.  Soon afterwards, the monkeys started showing some odd and frightening symptoms.  They'd spike a fever, become listless and glassy-eyed, and at the end would "bleed out" -- capillaries would start rupturing all over their body, and they'd bleed from every orifice including the pores of the skin.

Precautions were taken, but at first the researchers weren't overly concerned.  Most viruses have a feature called host specificity, which means that they tend to be infectious only in one species of host.  (This is why you don't need to worry about catching canine distemper, and your dog doesn't need to worry about catching your cold.)

It wasn't until someone realized the parallels with a (then) obscure viral outbreak in 1976 in Zaire (now the Republic of Congo) that the researchers realized things might be much more serious.  To see why, let me just say that the 1976 epidemic, which completely wiped out three villages, occurred on...

... the Ebola River.

Of course, you know that the feared introduction of this deadly virus into the United States didn't happen.  But to find out why -- and to find out just how lucky we were -- you should read Richard Preston's book The Hot Zone.  It's a brilliantly-written book detailing the closest we've come in recent years to a pandemic, and that from a virus that carries with it a 95% mortality rate.  (One comment: the first two chapters of this book require a bit of a strong stomach.  While Preston doesn't go out of his way to be graphic, the horrifying nature of this disease makes some nauseating descriptions inevitable.)

[Note:  If you purchase this book through the image/link below, part of the proceeds will go to supporting Skeptophilia!]

Inventing Glastonbury

It must come as a shock to woo-woos to find out that some of their favorite wooful phenomena were actually invented by humans for purely down-to-earth reasons.

Take, for example, the Ouija board.  A lot of paranormal enthusiasts claim that the Ouija board is some kind of portal to the spirit world -- and an equal number of religious types think it's the gateway to hell.  Using it, they say, is just asking to be possessed by an evil demon.  Unfortunately for both contentions, the Ouija board was invented as a parlor game by a toy manufacturer named Elijah Bond in 1890.  Even the name is made up -- Bond stuck together the French and German words for "yes" and decided it would make a catchy name.  Which it is.  Better than the words for "no," anyhow, because "Nonnein" sounds kind of silly.

So finding out that the Ouija board was invented purely to make money is a little deflating to those who think it's some kind of tool for accessing the supernatural.  Which makes me wonder how the woo-woos are going to deal with the recent claim by archaeologists that the hype over Glastonbury is a 12th-century fabrication.

Glastonbury Abbey [image courtesy of the Wikimedia Commons]

If you're not up to date with woo-woo mysticism and don't know what the deal is over Glastonbury, it's a town in England that is considered to be one of the most "spiritual" places in the world, right up there with Ayers Rock in Australia, Sedona, Arizona, and Salem, Massachusetts.  Supposedly, Glastonbury is the place where Joseph of Arimathea fled after Jesus's crucifixion, and when he got there he thrust his walking stick into the ground, where it took root and now flowers every Christmas.

The problem is, the Glastonbury Thorn doesn't flower at Christmas, it flowers in the spring, like most hawthorns.  No, the faithful say; that's because the current thorn isn't the real thing, which was cut down as an idolatrous image during the Puritan era following the English Civil War.  Even so, there are people who take the whole thing awfully seriously, which is why the current tree (planted in 1951) has been repeatedly vandalized.

Then there's the King Arthur connection, because Glastonbury Abbey is supposedly where the Once and Future King was buried after his death at the hands of his cousin Mordred in the Battle of Salisbury Plain.  There's even an inscription on a stone cross in the Abbey that allegedly has an inscription dating back to the fifth century, and which mentions King Arthur by name.

In addition to all this, or perhaps because of it, Glastonbury (or more specifically the hill Glastonbury Tor that stands nearby) has been identified as being the world's most powerful convergence of "ley lines," lines of spiritual force that allegedly encircle the globe. "[T]he landscape as a whole," we're told, "is imbued with a beauty, mystique and numinescence which has made it well loved over many centuries, and the haunt of many advanced souls."

So with all of this romantic folklore surrounding the spot, it's no wonder that people make pilgrimages to Glastonbury every year.  Which makes a recent paper published by a group of archaeologists at the University of Reading all the more devastating.

Because the new study has shown that all of the mystical trappings surrounding the place were the invention of some 12th century monks who were trying to find a way to raise money when their monastery burned down.

Archaeologist Roberta Gilchrist and her team have spent years looking at both the documents and the structures that supposedly play into the legend.  And she has concluded that after the fire, which occurred in 1184, some enterprising monks decided to cash in on the increasing popularity of the Arthurian mythology (Geoffrey of Monmouth's seminal Historia Regum Brittaniae had only been completed some 46 years earlier, and was still immensely influential).  So they started a rumor that Glastonbury was where Arthur was buried, and that he'd been buried there because it was where Joseph of Arimathea planted his walking stick.  "Look!" they said.  "There's a hawthorn tree up on that hill!  That's the ticket!"

And thus the legend of the Holy Thorn was begun.

Gilchrist and her team said that the stone cross was also the product of the same enterprising brothers, and had been fabricated to resemble earlier Anglo-Saxon and Celtic stone crosses, with the clever addition of an inscription mentioning Arthur by name.  And when they rebuilt the monastery, they made sure to make it of materials, and in a style, that made it look far older than it actually was, so the pilgrims (and the profits) kept rolling in.

As they still do, lo unto this very day.

It's kind of unfortunate, really.  I've always loved the Arthurian legends -- I grew up with tales of Merlin and Gawain and Morgan le Fay and the rest of them, not to mention my discovery during my teen years of Monty Python and the Search for the Holy Grail.  The idea that the whole thing might be some 12th century hoax is kind of sad.

You have to wonder how all the woo-woos will respond.  My guess is, they won't.  They'll ignore the current study just like they've avoided anything remotely factual in the past, and keep on claiming that ley lines and the rest are real.  They haven't based anything on evidence yet, so why start now?

All in the family

In the latest from the Wishful Thinking department, we have a woman in Murrysville, Pennsylvania who claims she is the Virgin Mary's first cousin, 65 times removed.

Mary Beth Webb began her inquiry into her genealogy in 1999, shortly after her brother was diagnosed with terminal cancer.  Like most of us who have done genealogical research, Webb started with census and other vital records, and used online resources like Ancestry.com and Rootsweb.  But this evidently proved inadequate -- she began to run into dead ends, which genealogists call "brick walls."  I have several of these frustrating people in my own family tree, the most annoying of which is the direct paternal ancestor of my grandmother.  His name is recorded as John Scott in all of the records -- but a recent Y-DNA study of one of his patrilineal descendants proved beyond question that he was actually a Hamilton, allied to the Scottish Clan Hamilton of Raploch.  And interestingly... two of his grandsons were named Hamilton Scott.

But we have been unable to find anything more about his origins, despite extensive research.

Perhaps, though, we should take a page from Webb's book.  Because when she became stymied by various long-dead ancestors, she adopted a novel method for researching her roots.  She simply asked her parents.

The "novel" part comes in because her parents were both dead at the time.

But fortunately for her, her cousin is a medium, and was happy to contact her parents for her, and (after his death) her brother.  And all three of the dear departed told her all sorts of details about her ancestors, because (after all) the whole lot of them were up in heaven with them.

I don't know if that'd work so well in my family.  I've got some seriously sketchy ancestry, including a guy who spent years in prison in New Jersey for "riot, poaching, and mischief," a Scottish dude who lost his soul to the devil in a game of cards, and a French military officer who almost got hanged for killing a guy he found in flagrante delicto with his wife.  So I might have better success if the medium tried contacting people down below, if you get my drift.

"Yes... great-great-great grandpa Jean-Pierre says to tell you hi, and to also to let you know you're a direct descendant of Attila the Hun.  Also, please send down an air conditioner, because it's a bit toasty down here.  Thanks bunches."

But of course, Webb's relatives all were either nicer or luckier or both, so she got scads of heaven-sent information about her genealogy.  And after a bit of this kind of "research," she found out that she was a direct descendant of Joseph of Arimathea, who was allegedly the Virgin Mary's uncle.  According to Webb's calculations, this makes her Mary's first cousin 65 times removed.

The problem is, the whole thing about Descent From Antiquity (as genealogists refer to any claims of pre-medieval proven ancestry) is that the best historians don't consider any of it to be true.  The time between the Fall of Rome and the beginning of the Medieval Age was seriously lacking in reliable documentation, and what we have in the way of such records stands a good chance of being (1) a forgery, or (2) a lie.  Or (3), both.  By the time the Medieval Age was in full swing, the Romans were looked upon as being a Golden Age, despite the fact that a good fraction of the nobility in ancient Rome seemed to have some major screws loose.  So there were lots of people claiming descent from the Emperors and Empresses to boost their own stature, with several proposed routes going the proconsul Flavius Afranius Syagrius, and thence to the Egyptian pharaohs and whatnot.

But some people one-up even Webb's claims, and trace their lineages all the way back to Adam and Eve.  I kid you not.  If you go into Rootsweb, you can do a search for people descended from Adam and Eve, and find thousands.

Now that's what I call descent from antiquity.

But, sadly, even the descent from the Romans relies on poor historical research and lots of wishful thinking, as does Webb's claim to have proven descent from Joseph of Arimathea.  About as far back as anyone with European ancestry can reliably get is Charlemagne, which sounds cool but isn't because damn near everyone with European ancestry descends from him, because he was proficient at one other thing besides ruling most of Western Europe, if you catch my meaning.

But honestly, that's really not that surprising.  Given the small size of the population back then, if you go back far enough (some geneticists say 1200 C.E. is sufficient), then you descend from everyone in your ancestral homeland who left descendants.  Put another way: prior to 1200 C. E., you can divide all of humanity into two groups; those who were the ancestors of most everyone alive on the Earth today, and those who were the ancestors of no one.  So we're all cousins, really.  And if Joseph of Arimathea left progeny -- which no one knows for sure -- then chances are, Mary Beth Webb is his descendant.

But chances are so am I, and (if you have European or Middle Eastern ancestry), so are you.

But I don't know that because my dead relatives told me so, I just know it because of genetic studies and logic.  Which may be less cool, but is a damn sight more reliable than trying to get a direct line to great-great-great grandpa Jean-Pierre down in hell.