BREAKING- Buddies Damon, Affleck are also distant relatives

[underpants]

http://wonderwall.msn.com/movies/buddies-damon-affleck-are-also-distant-relatives-1522883.story/?gt1=28135

BOSTON (AP) -- It seems Matt Damon and Ben Affleck are more than childhood pals and Hollywood collaborators.

According to the New England Genealogical Society, they're also cousins. Tenth cousins, once removed, that is.

Society researchers dug up evidence that both Damon and Affleck are descended from William Knowlton Jr. He was a bricklayer who came to the U.S. from England in the 1630s and settled in Ipswich.

The society said Friday that Affleck has lots of other famous relatives, including 16 U.S. presidents — Barack Obama among them — and the late Princess Diana.

Affleck and Damon were friends growing up in the Boston area and teamed up as writers and co-stars for the 1997 film "Good Will Hunting."

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[gmoney]

1. I bet *I'm* TENTH cousins, once removed from them, too...

This kind of genealogy-stretching is such crap... if you look far and wide enough, everyone's related to everyone else somehow.

[applegrove]

3. If you go back 1000 years everyone in Europe is related to each other. If you go back

2000 years everyone in Europe, North Africa and the Middle East are related to each other. Apparently we are all related to Jesus. Or so I've read. I forget where.

[pokerfan]

4. Go back twenty generations and you have a million ancestors

Go back thirty and the number becomes a billion, more people than would have been alive at that time indicating http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pedigree_collapse">pedigree collapse.

A http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Most_recent_common_ancestor">most recent common ancestor to all living persons most likely lived during recorded history, perhaps as recently as http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2004/09/040930122428.htm">a thousand years ago.

[Iggo]

2. We're all distant relatives. (n/t)