That's interesting. But it is only thought through about the sheer numbers. What about social status? If we go down from Charlesmagne, there were his three sons, all of them kings. The chance that one of their offspring became a peasant is there, clearly, but most of these descendants surely were nobility. So while I believe that a lot of people (me included) are actually descended from Charlesmagne, a lot might not be because they are from generations of peasant stock. But with people on this social level, there is not much documentation that can lead back to the times of Charlesmagne.
Yes, and just as you will find nobles among a King's descendants, you will find commoners among a noble's.
So while it is a good propability that people who can trace their ancestry back to 800 have at least some noble roots who could be followed up to Charlesmagne, a lot of people can't. These could or could not be descendants of Charlesmagne, we will never know.
The issue really has nothing to do with
proving descent from Charlemagne. It's the fact the the numbers alone show that anyone of European descent probably is, whether you can prove it or not. As you keep multiplying your ancestors by two, by the time you get to Charlemagne's time you reach roughly 4,294,967,296 ancestors. But there were probably only about 220 million people on Earth at that time. So it stands to reason that everyone descends from Charlemagne,
whether they can prove it or not.
Charlemagne’s DNA and Our Universal Royalty – Phenomena
There is also genetic evidence:
https://gcbias.org/european-genealogy-faq/
Intermarriage between Charlemagne's descendants can't account for hundreds of millions of missing ancestors. In fact, this intermarriage wasn't even that common in the first couple of centuries after his death. For example, if you look at this chart of Charlemagne's descendants down to the 12th generation you'll see there aren't a lot of overlapping lines:
Descendancy for Charlemagne, Emperor of the Holy Roman Empire 800-814 : Genealogics
And you will also find the illegitimate children of Henry I of England. Because of downward mobility, their descendants would have slowly moved from the nobility, to the gentry, to small land-owners, to merchants and tradesmen, etc., to common people, especially (as another poster pointed out) descendants of younger sons who had to make their own living while while their oldest brother inherited everything.
For example, when the 5th Baron Stafford died in 1637 his distant cousin Roger claimed the title. Roger was the son of a younger son of the 1st Baron. His grandmother Ursula Pole was the daughter of Margaret Countess of Salisbury, who was the daughter of George Duke of Clarence and the niece of Kings Edward IV and Richard III.
But because he was the son of a younger son Roger had fallen on hard times and it is believed he had even worked as a servant. Because of his poverty his claim to the title was denied. It was not seemly that a poor servant should rub shoulders with the peers of the realm. So within 150 years his line went from royalty, to nobility, to a poor servant.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Roger_Stafford,_6th_Baron_Stafford
One of my great-grandmothers was from a French comital family with a well-documented family tree and one line leads up to Charlesmagne, another to William the Conqueror (the family was from Normandy & Champagne). There are other lines as well.
But all these lines come from one ancestor of mine who actually was noble and we know about. My other ancestors are not as spectacular, at least as far as we could find out.
Once again, that doesn't mean the other ancestors aren't descendants of Charlemagne. It only means you don't have proof, one way or the other. For example, perhaps they descend from a line that fell on hard times centuries ago, say in 1200. Because they were no longer upper class they were no longer documented in the available records.
So, no, I don't believe all people have Royal ancestors somewhere in their family tree because Royal blood is something that sticks and keeps your family in the aristocracy for a long time. So it should be known till today.
No, many people know very little about their ancestors, especially those who lived hundreds of years ago. When genealogists began tracing Meghan Markle's ancestry, for example, they discovered she is a descendant of Edward III of England, who of course has multiple lines from Charlemagne.
See also the article about Danny Dyer, who learned about his own line of descent from Edward III on the TV show "Who Do You Think You Are?":
https://royaldescent.blogspot.com/2017/01/99-edward-iii-descent-for-danny-dyer-b.html
Even in the U.S., where we don't have a hereditary nobility, 34 of our 45 U.S. presidents have proven lines of descent from Charlemagne, including Barack Obama, our first black/biracial president.
As for the statistics: those people who today are of noble blood probably have so many lines leading up to Charlesmagne that they make up for those who don't have them.
That's backwards. The issue isn't with the number of descendants, it's the number of ancestors. There were so few people on Earth in Charlemagne's time that he had to be the ancestor of everyone on Earth today, at least those of us with European ancestry. You can't explain away hundreds of millions of missing ancestors that easily.
