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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
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