Posted: 12.05.06 09:05. Post subject: kinship among Europeans

From: Sklepp@aol.com [mailto:Sklepp@aol.com]

for kinship among Europeans, see Alex Shoumatoff, The Mountain of Names
(1985), especially the 9th chapter, "the Kinship of Mankind." He cites a
study that calculates that a child born in England in 1947 would be the
descendant of 5 out of every 6 Englishmen alive in 1086 at the time of the
Domesdday survey. He has other examples. bloodline is something else
again, it is a legal fiction of a patrilineal society practicing
primogeniture or some other restrictive inheritance system--and anyone who
has studied the dynastic wars of European aristocrats knows that
bloodlines are constantly dying out because of infertility or the absence of sons,
torn apart by fratricidal wars or by grasping uncles or those always evil
step-mothers, compromised by bastardy and adultery, overthrown by peasant
and bourgeois revolts and a host of other accidents. so haven't read the
book, but the premise seems unlikely

Susan Klepp