THAT POST I DID about the mathematical demonstration (maybe it might rise to the level of proof) that almost all people with European heritage have the 8th century emperor (gangster king) Charlemagne as an ancestor is something I've looked into more and I'm convinced it is almost a certainty based on the number of direct ancestors we would have at that distance in time back and the absolute number of Europeans alive at the time. We know that he left many, many children, legitimate and otherwise who, as well had children who had children.
Based on that I had to conclude that the entire concept of ethnicity as a biological classification was bogus. There were certainly many more people who had children in any stated ethnic category known to have been around at the time than any one person and, so, if Charlemagne is in our family line, so must at least some of the members of virtually every other ethnic group alive at the time. I took that to mean that every single Nazi had Jews in their family line, every European Jew certainly had what would now be called "antisemites" in their lineage, even every Brit would have Irish in their background and every Irish person should suspect that even they are a little bit English. Assuming that, whatever race they may be assigned, the Brits, Irish, Jews and Nazis all had at least partial European heritage dating back that far. Hard as all of those may be to take for the bigots among those various groups, they aren't the pure stock they love to imagine themselves as being. We are all mutts. That probably saved most of us some serious genetic trouble along the way.
I felt enormously freed from the burden of considering ethnicity as being anything but an imaginary categorization founded on ignorance of mathematics and probability, the fever dream of nationalists, ethnic chauvinists and the like turned into a parody of science, only fully believed in by scientists who are the only people who get to determine what science is at any given time. Though I was brought up to believe that everyone is equal so maybe someone brought up on ethnic chauvinism might not feel unburdened. For which I thank my liberal Irish Catholic parents.
Going back farther, of course, we all came from Africa and, no doubt, one original small group of pre-human ancestors. That only makes the idea of ethnicity even stupider.
Someday I might go into how Anthropology as a field had a chance to get past some of its worst aspects in and around the once dominant figure of Franz Boas and how the Darwinists derided him and swamped his more idealistic school of it after his death. Not that there weren't major problems with Boas for all of his numerous virtues - anthropology will never be science, it is, at best, a collection of competing and sometimes combating lores, generally told by frequently condescending outsiders with a hatchet to grind. You cannot study something like human cultures using science, though you can use some of those careful methods of study of which the so-called "scientific method" is supposed to be a specialized example. No one can look from the outside or the inside of a community and come to that level of understanding about it, divorced from pre-existing attitudes and judgements and ulterior motives to get real data and measurements. The idea that that could be done was ridiculous faith based in materialism. One of the stupider ones.
Ethnicity is an imaginary entity, I think if human beings have a future it will have to be scrapped. It gets too many people killed and oppressed.
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