I think the article I read must have been in a family history magazine, and not available online, but the point was that family trees actually include a very high proportion of intermarrying, and that if you go far back, people didn't move around from place to place so much, so all or nearly all of their ancestors would come from the same place where they lived. So they would not have many more ancestors in a particular generation than the actual number of people who were living around there at that time. (With the same applying going forwards from those ancestors to the number of descendants of any particular person.)
Of course royalty moved around but their descendants would have intermarried with a small group of families in the higher social strata.
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