According to Kanchana N. Ruwanpura,  Eastern Sri Lanka  "is highly regarded even among"  feminist economists  "for the relatively favourable position of its women, reflected" in women's equal achievements in  Human Development Indices  "(HDIs) as well as matrilineal and"  bilateral  "inheritance patterns and property rights". [ 88 ] [ 89 ]
She also conversely argues that " feminist economists  need to be cautious in applauding Sri Lanka's gender-based achievements and/or matrilineal communities", [ 90 ]  because these matrilineal communities coexist with " patriarchal  structures and ideologies" and the two "can be strange but ultimately compatible bedfellows", [ 91 ]  as follows:


She "positions Sri Lankan women within gradations of  patriarchy  by beginning with a brief overview of the main religious traditions,"  Buddhism ,  Hinduism , and  Islam , "and the ways in which patriarchal interests are promoted through religious practice" in Eastern Sri Lanka (but without being as repressive as classical patriarchy). [ 92 ]  Thus, "feminists have claimed that Sri Lankan women are relatively well positioned in the"  South Asian  region, [ 93 ] [ 78 ]  despite "patriarchal institutional laws that ... are likely to work against the interests of women," which is a "co-operative conflict" between women and these laws. [ 94 ]  (Clearly "female-heads have no legal recourse" from these laws which state "patriarchal interests".) [ 95 ]  For example, "the economic welfare of female-heads [heads of households] depends upon networks" ("of kin and [matrilineal] community"), "networks that mediate the patriarchal-ideological nexus." [ 96 ]  She wrote that "some female heads possessed" "feminist consciousness" [ 97 ] [ a ]  and, at the same time, that "in many cases female-heads are not vociferous feminists ... but rather 'victims' of patriarchal relations and structures that place them in precarious positions.... [while] they have held their ground ... [and] provided for their children". [ 98 ]


On the other hand, she also wrote that feminists including  Malathi de Alwis  and  Kumari Jayawardena  have criticized a romanticized view of women's lives in Sri Lanka put forward by Yalman, and mentioned the Sri Lankan case "where young women raped (usually by a man) are married-off/required to cohabit with the rapists!" [ 99 ]


Most ethnic groups classified as "( Montagnards ,  Malayo-Polynesian  and  Austroasian )" are matrilineal. [ 100 ]


On  North Vietnam , according to Alessandra Chiricosta, the legend of  Âu Cơ  is said to be evidence of "the presence of an original 'matriarchy' ... and [it] led to the double kinship system, which developed there .... [and which] combined matrilineal and patrilineal patterns of family structure and assigned equal importance to both lines." [ 101 ] [ b ]


While men held positions of religious and political power, the Spartan constitution mandated that inheritance and proprietorship pass from mother to daughter. [ 102 ]


In Pictish society, succession in leadership (later kingship) was matrilineal (through the mother's side), with the reigning chief succeeded by either his brother or perhaps a nephew but not through patrilineal succession of father to son. [ 103 ]


Some oceanic societies, such as the  Marshallese  and the Trobrianders, [ 104 ]  the  Palauans , [ 105 ]  the  Yapese [ 106 ]  and the Siuai, [ 107 ]  are characterized by matrilineal descent. The sister's sons or the brothers of the decedent are commonly the successors in these societies.


Matrilineality in Judaism or matrilineal descent in Judaism is the tracing of  Jewish  descent through the maternal line. Close to all Jewish communities have followed matrilineal descent from at least early  Tannaitic  (c. 10–70 CE) times through modern times. [ 108 ]


The origins and date-of-origin of matrilineal descent in Judaism are uncertain.  Orthodox Judaism  maintains that matrilineal descent is an  Oral Law  from at least the time of the Receiving of the Torah on  Mount Sinai  (c. 1310 BCE). [ 109 ]  According to some modern academic opinions, it was likely instituted in either the early  Tannaitic period  (c. 10–70 CE) or the time of  Ezra  (c. 460 BCE). [ 108 ]


In practice, Jewish denominations define " Who is a Jew? " via descent in different ways. All denominations of Judaism have protocols for  conversion  for those who are not Jewish by descent.


Orthodox Judaism [ 110 ]  and  Conservative Judaism [ 108 ] [ 111 ]  still practice matrilineal descent.  Karaite Judaism , which rejects the Oral Law, generally practices patrilineal descent.  Reconstructionist Judaism  has recognized Jews of patrilineal descent since 1968. [ 112 ]


In 1983, the  Central Conference of American Rabbis  of  Reform Judaism  passed a resolution waiving the need for formal conversion for anyone with at least one Jewish parent, provided that either (a) one is raised as a Jew, by Reform standards, or (b) one engages in an appropriate act of public identification, formalizing a practice that had been common in Reform synagogues for at least a generation. This 1983 resolution departed from the Reform Movement's previous position requiring formal conversion to Judaism for children without a Jewish mother. [ 113 ]  However, the closely associated  Israel Movement for Reform and Progressive Judaism  has rejected this resolution and requires formal conversion for anyone without a Jewish mother. [ 114 ]


In the United States, the offspring of enslaved women inherited their mother's status. A significant consequence of this is that children resulting from rape or unions between enslaved women and their owners did not have any of the rights of the father as they would have had under the patrilineal succession that applied to everyone but the enslaved.


Certain ancient myths have been argued to expose ancient traces of matrilineal customs that existed before historical records.


The ancient historian  Herodotus  is cited by  Robert Graves  in his translations of Greek myths as attesting that the  Lycians [ 115 ] [ 116 ]  of their times "still reckoned" by matrilineal descent, or were matrilineal, as were the  Carians . [ 117 ]


In Greek mythology, while the royal function was a  male privilege , power devolution often came through women, and the future king inherited power through marrying the queen heiress.  This is illustrated in the  Homeric  myths where all the noblest men in Greece vie for the hand of  Helen  (and the throne of  Sparta ), as well as the Oedipian cycle where  Oedipus  weds the recently widowed queen at the same time he assumes the Theban kingship.


This trend also is evident in many  Celtic myths , such as the (Welsh)  mabinogi  stories of  Culhwch and Olwen , or the (Irish)  Ulster Cycle , most notably the key facts to the  Cúchulainn  cycle that Cúchulainn gets his final secret training with a  warrior  woman,  Scáthach , and becomes the lover of her daughter; and the root of the  Táin Bó Cuailnge , that while  Ailill  may wear the crown of  Connacht , it is his wife  Medb  who is the real power, and she needs to affirm her equality to her husband by owning chattels as great as he does.


The Picts are widely cited as being matrilineal. [ 118 ] [ 119 ]


A number of other  Breton  stories also illustrate the motif. Even the  King Arthur  legends have been interpreted in this light by some.  For example, the  Round Table , both as a piece of furniture and as concerns the majority of knights belonging to it, was a gift to Arthur from  Guinevere 's father  Leodegrance .


Arguments also have been made that matrilineality lay behind various  fairy tale  plots which may contain the vestiges of folk traditions not recorded.


For instance, the widespread motif of a father who wishes to marry his own daughter—appearing in such tales as  Allerleirauh ,  Donkeyskin ,  The King who Wished to Marry His Daughter , and  The She-Bear —has been explained as his wish to prolong his reign, which he would lose after his wife's death to his son-in-law. [ 120 ]  More mildly, the hostility of kings to their daughter's suitors is explained by hostility to their successors.  In such tales as  The Three May Peaches ,  Jesper Who Herded the Hares , or  The Griffin , kings set dangerous tasks in an attempt to prevent the marriage. [ 121 ]


Fairy tales with hostility between the mother-in-law and the heroine—such as  Mary's Child ,  The Six Swans , and Perrault's  Sleeping Beauty —have been held to reflect a transition between a matrilineal society, where a man's loyalty was to his mother, and a patrilineal one, where his wife could claim it, although this interpretation is predicated on such a transition being a normal development in societies. [ 122 ]


In modern  Rabbinic Judaism , the traditional method of determining  Jewishness  relies on tracing one's  maternal line . According to  halakha , the recognition of someone as fully  Jewish  requires them to have been born to a Jewish mother. [ 1 ]  A person who is born to a non-Jewish mother and a Jewish father is regarded as  Zera Yisrael  ( lit.   ' Seed of  Israel ' ) and will only be accepted as  ethnically Jewish  and not as  religiously Jewish . Thus, being Jewish through the  paternal line  typically necessitates  conversion to Judaism  to validate one's identity as a Jew in the fullest sense.


Matrilineal descent is observed in  Orthodox Judaism  and  Conservative Judaism , whereas  Reform Judaism  and  Reconstructionist Judaism  accept full Jewishness through either parent; Reform responsa, however, requires an exclusively Jewish upbringing. Patrilineal descent was observed by the ancient  Israelites  and is still observed by the  Samaritans  and in  Karaite Judaism , which asserts that only the  Hebrew Bible  by itself—that is, disregarding the  oral traditions of Rabbinic Judaism —is legally and religiously binding.


Historical evidence marshalled by Professor  Shaye J. D. Cohen  indicates that a change from a patrilineal to a matrilineal-based principle for the offspring of mixed unions of Jew and gentile took place in the  1st century  (c. 10–70 CE) times. [ 2 ]  Yet, the precise date of the shifting from patrilineality to matrilineality is disputed, according to many modern academic opinions, it was likely instituted in either the early  Tannaitic period  ( c.  10–70 CE ) or in the time of  Ezra  ( c.  460 BCE ). [ 3 ] [ 4 ] [ 5 ]


The practice of matrilineal descent differs by denomination. Each denomination has protocols for  conversion to Judaism  for those who are not Jewish by birth. The  State of Israel  adheres to the Jewish law of matrilineal descent for matters which could affect Israeli family law. [ 6 ]


The  Conservative Movement  practices matrilineal descent. [ 3 ]  In 1986, the Conservative Movement's Rabbinical Assembly reiterated the commitment of the Conservative Movement to the practice of matrilineal descent. [ 7 ]  Furthermore, the movement stated that any rabbi who accepts the principle of patrilineal descent will be subject to expulsion from the Rabbinical Assembly. [ citation needed ]  Still, the Conservative Movement affirmed that "sincere Jews by choice" should be warmly welcomed into the community and that "sensitivity should be shown to Jews who have intermarried and their families." The Conservative Judaism movement actively reaches out to intermarried families by offering them opportunities for Jewish growth and enrichment.


The Ratner Center for the Study of Conservative Judaism conducted a survey of 1,617 members of 27 Conservative congregations in the U.S. and Canada in 1995. [ 8 ]  69% of respondents to the Ratner Center survey agreed that they would regard personally as a Jew anyone who was raised Jewish—even if their mother was Gentile and their father was Jewish (Wertheimer, 59). In this same survey, 29% of respondents indicated that they attended Jewish religious services twice a month or more and 13% that they engage in the study of a Jewish text once a month or more (Wertheimer, 55–57). [ relevant? ]


The majority view in Karaite Judaism is that Jewish identity can only be transmitted by patrilineal descent. [ 9 ] [ 10 ] [ 11 ]  They argue that only patrilineal descent can transmit Jewish identity on the grounds that all descent in the Torah went according to the male line. [ 12 ]  Only someone who is patrilineally Jewish (someone whose father's father was Jewish) is regarded as a Jew by the  Mo'eṣet HaḤakhamim , or the Karaite Council of Sages based in Israel.


Both Rabbinic and Karaite Jews lived in 12th century Egypt, [ 13 ]  and a number of marriage contracts between Karaite and Rabbinic individuals have been discovered in the  Cairo Genizah . [ 14 ]  The Egyptian Karaites followed patrilineal descent, [ 15 ]  but forbade marriage with non-Jews [ 14 ]  and also did not allow converts into their community. [ 16 ]  In effect then, 12th century Egyptian Karaites required that  both  parents be Jewish, but they referred to this requirement as patrilineal descent. Thus, marriages between Karaites and the Rabbinic community did not violate the Rabbinate requirement of matrilineality. However, these marriages came to a halt when  Maimonides  (who led the Rabbinate Jewish community in Egypt in the late 12th century) prohibited them for a separate reason: while he considered Karaites Jewish, he also considered them to potentially fall within the category of  mamzerut , as their divorces were not conducted according to Rabbinate standards. [ 14 ]


Orthodox Judaism  practices matrilineal descent. [ 17 ] [ 18 ]   Orthodox Judaism holds that anyone with a Jewish mother also has irrevocable Jewish status; that even were such a Jew to convert to another religion, that person would still be considered Jewish by Jewish Law.


Reconstructionist Judaism was the first movement to adopt the idea of bilineal descent in 1968. [ 19 ]  According to Reconstructionist Judaism, children of one Jewish parent, regardless of gender, are considered Jewish if raised as Jews.


In 1983, the  Central Conference of American Rabbis  of  Reform Judaism  passed a resolution waiving the need for formal conversion for anyone with at least one Jewish parent, provided that either (a) one is raised as a Jew, by Reform standards, or (b) one engages in an appropriate act of public identification, formalizing a practice that had been common in Reform synagogues for at least a generation. This 1983 resolution departed from the Reform Movement's previous position requiring formal conversion to Judaism for children without a Jewish mother. [ 20 ]


The 1983 resolution of the American Reform movement has had a mixed reception in Reform Jewish communities outside of the United States. Most notably, the  Israel Movement for Reform and Progressive Judaism  has rejected patrilineal descent and requires formal conversion for anyone without a Jewish mother. [ 21 ]  As well, a joint Orthodox, Traditional, Conservative and Reform Bet Din formed in Denver, Colorado to promote uniform standards for conversion to Judaism was dissolved in 1983, due to that Reform resolution. [ 22 ]  However, in 2015 the majority of Britain's Assembly of Reform Rabbis voted in favor of a position paper proposing "that individuals who live a Jewish life, and who are patrilineally Jewish, can be welcomed into the Jewish community and confirmed as Jewish through an individual process." [ 23 ]  Britain's Assembly of Reform Rabbis stated that rabbis "would be able to take local decisions—ratified by the  Beit Din —confirming Jewish status." [ 23 ]


Other movements within the  World Union for Progressive Judaism  also adopted essentially the same position. These include:  Liberal Judaism  in England; Progressive Judaism in Australia; one congregation in Austria; some congregations in Eastern Europe. Note that Reform Judaism in Canada adopts a different position, similar to that of Conservative Judaism (though there may be an accelerated conversion process for the children of Jewish fathers). [ citation needed ]


Orthodox Judaism maintains that the law of matrilineal descent in Judaism dates at least to the time of the covenant at Sinai ( c.  1310 BCE ). [ 24 ]  This law was first codified in writing in the Mishna ( c.  2nd century CE ), [ 25 ]  and later in the  Mishneh Torah  (c. 1170–1180 CE) [ 26 ]  and  Shulchan Aruch  (1563 CE), without mention of any dissenting opinion. [ 27 ]


According to one opinion, Jewish descent was patrilineal before the giving of the Torah, and only since then has been matrilineal. [ 28 ]


The  Talmud  adduces the law of matrilineal descent from  Deuteronomy 7:3–4 , which warns that as the consequence of intermarriage "he (the gentile father) will turn away your son (i.e., the child born to your Jewish daughter) from following Me". Since only "he" (a non-Jewish father) is mentioned and not "she" (a non-Jewish mother), the Talmud concludes that "your (grand)son who comes from an Israelite woman is called 'your son' (and warned about in the verse), while your (grand)son who comes from a foreign woman is not called 'your son'". Thus, Jewish descent is through the mother. [ 29 ]


The Matriarchs of Israel are considered  the mothers of  the Tribes of Israel; for those who adhere to Jewish Law, Israelite Nationhood or belonging to the Jewish People via descent exclusively follows the mother's line. [ 30 ]


Some Hasidic Jewish groups propose that matrilineality and matriarchy within Judaism are related to the metaphysical concept of the Jewish soul. [ 31 ] [ 24 ]


The stories of the Patriarchs and Matriarchs in  Genesis  are generally compatible with matrilineal descent, if one makes the assumption that Abraham's extended family was "Jewish":


The stories are generally incompatible with patrilineal descent, in that a single father (Abraham or Isaac) had children, some of whom were considered the ancestors of Jews and others of non-Jews.


In  Genesis 21:13  God refers to Hagar's son as "the son of the maidservant" rather than "your [Avraham's] son"  (while also referring to Hagar's son as Abraham's seed); [ 40 ]  later rabbinic sources deduce from this that a Jewish man's child is considered "his" child only if the mother is Jewish. [ 41 ]


Moses married  Zipporah , a  Midianite  woman. They had two sons, Gershom and Eliezer, [ 42 ]  both born before the Exodus. [ 43 ]  The sons of Moses—with an Israelite father and Midianite mother—are absent from the genealogies of Levi, which do include the sons of Moses' brother  Aaron  (whose wife was Israelite). [ 44 ]


In the accounts of the Prophets and Writings (which covers a time period of nearly a millennium) there are two cases of non-Israelite women who voluntarily (not resulting from conflict) married Israelites where their children were considered Israelite. According to the Talmud, both of these women,  Ruth  and  Naamah , formally converted. [ 45 ]  Both the Moabite and Ammonite nations were descended from Lot, the nephew of Abraham. [ 46 ]


In the Book of Ruth, Naomi and her husband Elimelech were a Judean couple. Their family moved to Moab during a famine, but Elimelech died there. [ 47 ]  Naomi's two sons married Moabite women, named Ruth and Orpah. [ 48 ]  Naomi's two sons then died. [ 49 ]  Naomi and Ruth then journeyed back to Judah. [ 50 ]  Then in selling her late husband's land in Judah and the estates of her sons, Naomi set up the stipulation that her financial redeemer also marry her former daughter-in-law. [ 51 ]  The first potential redeemer declined, lest this marriage "ruin [his] inheritance". [ 52 ]  Boaz, the next of kin, became Naomi's redeemer, married Ruth and became the father of Obed, who was the ancestor of  David . [ 53 ]  Ruth was the mother of Obed, but Naomi cared for the child, and their neighbors would say "A son has been born to Naomi". [ 54 ]


Solomon "loved many foreign women". [ 55 ]  Among them was Naamah the Ammonite. Solomon and Naamah's son Rehoboam was a Judean king of the Davidic line. [ 56 ]


Tamar, daughter of King David  attempted to persuade her half-brother Amnon not to rape her, by suggesting that he could legitimately marry her instead. [ 57 ]  This suggestion is difficult to understand, as  Leviticus 18:9  prohibits marriage to half-siblings by either father or mother.  Rashi  (1040–1105 CE) attempted to resolve this problem by noting that Tamar's mother was a non-Israelite—Maacah, daughter of Talmai king of Geshur. [ 58 ]  If Jewish descent is matrilineal, and Maacah was not converted to Israelite religion at the time Tamar was conceived, then Tamar would be born non-Israelite, legally unrelated to Amnon (despite being his half-sister) and thus permitted to marry him. [ 43 ] [ 59 ]


Ezra 9–10  describes how many Israelite men had intermarried with non-Jewish women, [ 60 ]  and tells the story of their renunciation of intermarriage and separation from the non-Jewish wives and from their children. [ 61 ]
While Ezra and  Nehemiah  prohibited intermarriage by both men and women, [ 62 ]  only regarding intermarriage between a Jewish man and non-Jewish woman was it necessary to separate from the children. [ 63 ]


The necessity of separating from the children as well as the wives suggests that the children were not considered Jewish despite having Jewish fathers. In rabbinic sources, this verse is understood to be proof of matrilinearity. [ 64 ]


Several Biblical individual appear to have been treated as Jewish despite having a non-Jewish father.  Hiram the craftsman  was employed to build Solomon's Temple despite having a Phoenician father (and Israelite mother). [ 65 ]   Amasa  was entrusted with control of an Israelite army, despite having a non-Israelite father (and Israelite mother). [ 66 ]


The Hellenistic Jewish philosopher,  Philo of Alexandria  (c. 20 BCE–50 CE) calls the child of a Jew and a non-Jew a  nothos  (bastard), regardless of whether the non-Jewish parent is the father or the mother. [ 67 ]


Flavius  Josephus  (c. 37–100 CE), the Romanized Jewish historian, describes  Antigonus II Mattathias  (c. 63–37 BCE) denigrating  Herod —whose father's family were Idumean Arabs forcibly converted to Judaism by  John Hyrcanus [ 68 ]  and whose mother, according to Josephus, was non-Jewish (either an Idumean Arab [ 69 ]  or Arabian (Nabatean-Arab) [ 70 ] )—by referring to him as "an Idumean i.e. a half-Jew" and as therefore unfit to be given governorship of Judea by the Romans (as  Deuteronomy 17:15  requires the king to be Jewish). [ 71 ]


Dr.  Immanuel Jakobovits  offers some possible reasons for the law of matrilineality:


Several reasons may be given for the rule. A child from a mixed marriage could not legally be a 50% Jew, growing up with a half commitment or a double faith. A choice must be made, and once made, it must be consistently applied in all cases, since no law can be arbitrary or subject to personal variations. Now, in making this choice, the certainty of maternity must be set against the doubt of paternity, however small this doubt may be. In such cases Jewish law invariably invokes the rule "a doubt can never over-rule a certainty".


Even in nature, the mother's bond with her child is, in some respects, firmer than the father's. It was Eve (Hebrew  Chavah ) who was so called "because she was the mother of all living ( chay )" (Gen. 3:20), whereas Adam was not named " Chayim " as "the father of all life". It must also be remembered that Jewish law, unable to sanction or recognise a mixed marriage as religiously valid, technically regards the child as born out of wedlock and therefore legally having a mother only.


In a wider sense, the determination of the child's religious status by the mother may also indicate that she has the superior influence on the child's religious development. [ 72 ]


Rabbi  Louis Jacobs  wrote in a review of an article by Professor  Shaye J. D. Cohen  on matrilineal descent in Judaism:


There has been a development of the law in these instances from Biblical and pre-Rabbinic times. The attempt to find reasons for the change, however, has proved to be elusive and is quite unnecessary since it can be explained entirely economically by the logic of the law itself and is typical of Rabbinic thinking in general. But the development in the law had already taken place before the redaction of the Mishnah at the very latest. With the exception of the Rabbi in the Jerusalem Talmud (Qiddushin, 3:12) who permitted the child of a gentile mother and Jewish father to be circumcised on the Sabbath and whose opinion was vehemently rejected, the law is accepted unanimously in both Talmuds. It is recorded as the law in all the Codes without dissenting voice and has been the universal norm in all Jewish communities. For such a law to be changed, only the weightiest religious and ethical advantages will suffice and it is difficult indeed to discover any such in the change in this particular instance. To change this particular law would strike at the heart of the whole halakhic process and would involve a theological as well as an halakhic upheaval. And for what? The potential loss is great. The gains, if any, are few and the price is far too high. [ 3 ]


Cohen himself questions the date of origin of matrilineal descent as follows:


The preexilic portions of the Hebrew Bible are not familiar with the matrilineal principle. Numerous Israelite heroes and kings married foreign women; for example, Judah married a Canaanite, Joseph an Egyptian, Moses a Midianite and an Ethiopian, David a Philistine, and Solomon women of every description. Although Exod. 34:16 and Deut. 7:1–3 prohibit intermarriage only with the Canaanites, a prohibition that was supposed to have originated with the patriarchs Abraham (Gen. 24:3) and Isaac (Gen. 27:46–28:1), some Israelites extended the prohibition to include all foreigners (Judg. 14:3). But it never occurred to anyone in preexilic times to argue that such marriages were null and void. Marriage was the non-sacramental, private acquisition of a woman by a man, and the state had little or no legal standing in the matter. The foreign woman who married an Israelite husband was supposed to leave her gods in her father's house, but even if she did not, it never occurred to anyone to argue that her children were not Israelites. Since the idea of conversion to Judaism did not yet exist, it never occurred to anyone to demand that the foreign woman undergo some ritual to indicate her acceptance of the religion of Israel. The woman was joined to the house of Israel by being joined to her Israelite husband; the act of marriage was functionally equivalent to the later idea of conversion. In some circumstances biblical law and society did pay attention to maternal identity–the children of concubines and female slaves sometimes rank lower than the children of wives–but it never occurred to anyone to impose any legal or social disabilities on the children of foreign women. [ 4 ]


Cohen does admit one circumstance in which the Bible accepted the matrilineal status of children of an Israelite woman and non-Israelite man: a "matrilocal" marriage in which the husband moved to the wife's location and joined her clan, rather than the more typical reverse. [ 4 ]


In his review of Cohen's article, Rabbi Jacobs accepts that the law may have changed in the early Tannaitic period (c. 10–70 CE): "From the historical evidence marshalled by Professor Cohen it would appear that the change from the patrilineal to the matrilineal principle for the offspring of mixed unions of Jew and gentile took place in the early Tannaitic period." [ 3 ]  Other modern scholars believe that the matrilineal principle dates at least to the time of Ezra, [ 73 ] [ 5 ] [ 74 ]  and Cohen himself does not rule this out as a possibility. [ 4 ]


Jacobs dismisses Cohen's suggestion that "the Tannaim were influenced by the Roman [ 75 ]  legal system..." [ 3 ]  and contends that "even if the Rabbis were familiar with the Roman law, they might have reacted to it [instead] by preserving the patrilineal principle, holding fast to their own system." [ 3 ]  Cohen's proposed connection to Roman law was also rejected by  Michael Corinaldi  [ he ] , who noted a fundamental difference between Roman and rabbinic law: Roman law assigned matrilineal status in cases where no marriage exists and therefore the child is considered to have no father, whereas in rabbinic law a child's status is unaffected by whether the parents are married to each other. [ 76 ]


Instead, Jacobs offers another explanation. Jacobs believes that an Israelite man who married a non-Israelite woman and had a child, that woman and child were considered not part of the "family clan" and therefore were not considered Israelite: "A child born of a Jewish father and a gentile mother cannot be given the status of the father since the patrilineal principle is stated only with regard to unions within the clan. How can the father who steps out of the clan bestow a clan status on the child whom he sires?" [ 3 ]


Cohen, too, suggests another possible explanation: that rabbinic thought viewed maternal descent to be biologically fundamental, as shown by the  Mishnah  (though not the  Tosefta  or Babylonian Talmud), in which the species of animals for purposes of  kilayim  follows the mother, [ 77 ]  and applied the same standard to humans as well. [ 4 ]


Cohen's position was also criticized by  Robert Gordis , who questioned whether such a dramatic change (i.e. from patrilineality to matrilineality) would have been occurred without being mentioned in the extensive sources from the time. [ 78 ]


Lawrence Schiffman  noted that Josephus described Herod as being criticized as unsuitable for Jewish monarchy, due to his non-Jewish mother and the Biblical prohibition ( Deut 17:15 ) on installing a non-Jewish king. According to Schiffman, this indicates that matrilineality was a broadly accepted norm at the time, assumed by Josephus as well as the Mishnah. Schiffman further asserted that a matrilineal principle likely already existed at the time of Ezra, due to the natural relationship between mother and child. According to Schiffman, in the First Temple period those women who moved to Israelite territory effectively underwent "informal conversion" to join the Jewish people. But upon the loss of national territory with the  Babylonian captivity , Jewish status became an individual matter, and the matrilineal principle was established. [ 79 ]


According to  Trude Weiss-Rosmarin , in a polygamous setting like Biblical society, identity was more closely tied to the mother than the father. Each wife had her own dwelling which was shared with her children, and where the husband was a visitor. The rabbinic principle of matrilineality was an adaptation of this model to a reality in which polygamy had become rare. [ 80 ]


Arnold Goodman argued that the halakhic norm of patrilineal tribal descent and matrilineal Jewish status is a logical one: Children naturally take the status of their mother, except when the mother has been "acquired" as wife by the husband, in which the status is that of the husband. But as marriage between Jew and non-Jew is invalid in halakha, the father has no connection to the children, and status remains with the mother. [ 81 ]


A 2013 Pew Research Center survey shows that American children of interfaith marriages are more likely to have been raised Jewish and identify as Jewish than in the past, which some scholars attribute to more welcoming and inclusive attitudes among Jewish organizations. [ 82 ]   The increasing awareness and social validation of  self-concept  as defining one's identity may also be a contributing factor.


Studies have shown that American adults whose fathers are Jewish and whose mothers are not can readily identify lasting damage to their identity formation, family relations and faith due to patrilineal rejection, regardless of whether they were raised as Jews. Experiences include being singled out and made to feel unwelcome at Jewish events, sites and schools; pressure to disguise their heritage; being bullied or isolated; uncertainty regarding their personal identity; and narrowed access to a Jewish education and a community of faith. [ 83 ] [ 84 ]   It is not uncommon for interfaith families and their offspring rejected by matrilineal devotees to simultaneously suffer external discrimination on the basis of being Jews.


Researcher  Sergio Della Pergola  found that in English-speaking countries, "the mother is the dominant parent in transmitting a group identity to the children of [intermarriages]. If the mother is Jewish, the child tends more often to be identified as Jewish, and if the mother is not Jewish, the child tends to be non-Jewish." [ 85 ]


Progressive writers  Elana Maryles Sztokman  and Jessica Fishman view matrilineality as an outdated patriarchal form of control over women's bodies. Fishman labels matrilineality a fundamental denial of the right of personhood. [ 86 ]


Legal scholar Reut Paz views matrilineality as a form of "legal privilege" for women, which offers the potential for increasing gender equality in a world where power is generally patriarchal. [ 87 ]


A  matrilineal  surname  or  matriname [ 1 ] [ a ]  is a  family name  inherited from one's mother, and maternal grandmother, and so on whose  line of descent  is called a mother-line, mitochondrial line, or  matriline.   A matriname passed on to subsequent issue is unchanged, as compared to a  matronymic , which is derived from the first name of each new mother.


The term "matriname" was introduced by Prof.  Bryan Sykes  in his book  The Seven Daughters of Eve , stating that "We would then all have three names: a first name, a surname and a new one, a matriname perhaps." [ 1 ] [ b ]


The mitochondrial DNA ( mtDNA ) is inherited by biological motherhood whereas the matriname can be equally given after adoption or surrogacy. [ 1 ]


The usual lack of matrinames to pass on in patrilineal cultures makes traditional  genealogy  more difficult in the maternal line than in the paternal line. [ 1 ]  After all, father-line surnames originated partly to identify individuals clearly and were adopted partly for administrative reasons, [ c ]  and these patrinames help in searching for facts and documentation from centuries ago. Patrinames are stable identity-surnames, surnames which identify an individual, whether now or in the past or future; matrinames similarly are identity-surnames for women.


In the 1979 Convention on the Elimination of Discrimination Against Women ( CEDAW ) the UN holds the view, in item (g) of its Article 16, that women and men, and specifically wife and husband, have the same rights to choose a " family name " as well as a "profession" and an "occupation". [ 2 ]  These three rights are a small part of the document's long list of rights related to  gender equality  meant to ensure women have equal opportunities to men. However, the United States has signed but not yet ratified this UN Convention. [ 2 ]


Sykes argues choosing a "family name", or surname, should mean combining a matriname with a patriname, to avoid discriminating against either women or men.


Some cultures have no  surnames  at all. If a culture has these then to not discriminate it combines both, as mentioned above; that is, the matriname and the patriname are both given in each child's birth record.


Note that one's resulting birth surname is one's legal surname, unless one changes the latter.


In several purely patrilineal cultures, including most of Europe, women traditionally change to their husband's patriname at marriage: see  married and maiden names  and  name change .


Some cultures use both paternal and maternal surname, such as  Spanish naming customs ,  Portuguese names , and the  naming customs of Hispanic America . The patrilineal surname—patriname—taken from the mother in these patrilineal cultures does  not  qualify as a matriname. Instead, this Hispanic practice uses the maternal patriname.


Double surnames were discussed in  The Seven Daughters of Eve . [ 1 ]   Double surnames were also used by one English family, along with the matriname "Phythian". [ 3 ]
In this case the mother has the birth double surname " Phythian -Adams", and the father has birth double surname "??-Monkhouse".  They both choose to retain their birth double surnames unchanged throughout their lives.  They agree to denominate all of their daughters and sons with the birth double surname "Phythian-Monkhouse": The mother passes on her matriname (and  mtDNA ), and symmetrically, the father passes on his patriname. All of their sons have the  Y-DNA  of and, accordingly, the patriname "Monkhouse" of their patriline, while all of the daughters have both the  mtDNA  of and, accordingly, the matriname "Phythian" of their matriline. [ 1 ] [ 3 ]  (Note that most societies give all children of a family the same surname, as in this example.) Each person has only one identity-surname, which in this example is either "Phythian" or "Monkhouse". The identity-surname of each is stable throughout life and always half of whatever double surname(s) he or she assumes throughout life, including at birth and marriage(s).


The parents in this example share this one family name, "Phythian-Monkhouse". [ 4 ]


One's own identity-surname (here, the matriname "Phythian" or the patriname "Monkhouse") are always available as one's own usage name, such as in one's profession/vocation.


In summary, gender-symmetric single surnames are simpler and briefer, but if used alone, give  different  surnames for members of the different genders in a nuclear family. In the double system, all of the children in a nuclear family have the  same double  surname. Also, the system generally records on all legal documents the matriname and patriname, with both identity-surnames later aiding  each  gender in genealogy and other searches of historical records. [ 1 ] [ 3 ]


Milk kinship , formed during nursing by a non-biological mother, was a form of fostering allegiance with fellow community members. This particular form of  kinship  did not exclude particular groups, such that  class  and other hierarchal systems did not matter in terms of milk kinship participation.


Traditionally speaking, this practice predates the  early modern period , though it became a widely used mechanism for developing alliances in many hierarchical societies during that time. Milk kinship used the practice of  breast feeding  by a  wet nurse  to feed a child either from the same community, or a neighbouring one. This wet nurse played the strategic role in forging relations between her family and the family of the child she was nursing, as well as their community.


"Colactation links two families of unequal status and creates a durable and intimate bond; it removes from 'clients' their outsider status but excludes them as marriage partners...it brings about a social relationship that is an alternative to kinship bonds based on blood." [ 1 ]  People of different races and religions could be brought together strategically through the bonding of the milk mother and their milk 'children'.


Milk kinship was as relevant for peasants as 'fostering' or as 'hosting' other children, in that it secured the good will from their masters and their wives. As previously mentioned the milk women's family is the 'core range' to the child she is nursing and they become milk kin, which may strategically be useful for the future if the child is from a higher class family, as the milk women's children will become 'milk-brothers' and 'milk-sisters.' Thus peasant women would most often play the role of the 'milk' mother to her non-biological children, and they held an important role in maintaining the connection between herself and the master whose baby she is nursing. It was also a practical way to assist families who were of a very ill mother or whose mother died in childbirth. This would have been helpful in many societies where, especially in times of war, if families perished, other members of society would end up co-parenting through the link of milk-kinship.


Noble offspring were often sent to milk kin fosterers that would foster them to maturity so that the children would be raised by their successive status subordinates. The purpose of this was for political importance to build milk kin as bodyguards. This was a major practice in the Hindu Kush society. [ 2 ] : 315


One particular theory mentioned by Peter Parkes is an Arab folk-analogy that breast milk is supposed to be "transformed male semen" that arises from Héritier's Somatic Scheme. [ 2 ] : 308   There is no evidence that Arabs ever considered a mother's milk to be 'transformed sperm'. [ 2 ] : 312   Another suggested analogy is that breast milk was a refinement of uterine blood. It is also suggested since that milk is of the woman, her moods and dispositions are transferred through the breast milk. Parkes mentions that milk-kinship was "further endorsed as a canonical impediment to marriage by several eastern Christian churches". [ 2 ] : 320   This indicates that this procedure was widely practiced among numerous religious communities, not just Islamic communities, in the early modern Mediterranean.


Soraya Altorki (1980) published a pioneering article on Sunni Arab notions of kinship created through suckling breast milk (Arabic:  rida'a orrada' ). Altorki indicated that milk kinship had received little attention from anthropologists, despite its recognised significance in Muslim family law as a complex impediment to marriage. Milk kinship has since attracted further fieldwork throughout Islamic Asia and North Africa, demonstrating its importance as a culturally distinctive institution of adoptive affiliation.


Héritier's  somatic  thesis posits that Islamic marriage between milk kin is forbidden because of an ancient pre-Islamic  meme  that is communicated in the Arab saying 'the milk is from the man'. [ 3 ]  Héritier's somatic explanation has since been endorsed – and apparently confirmed – by several French ethnographers of the Maghreb, also being further developed in her monograph on incest. [ 4 ]


In reaction, a few scholars have cited Islamic commentaries and jurisprudence. "A child is the product of the conjoint seed of man and woman . . . but milk is the property of woman alone; one should not conflate by analogy (qiyas) milk with male semen." Al-Qurtubi, Jami' al-ahkam V.83, cited in Benkheira (2001a: 26). The rules of Sunni marital incest apply through a standard of adoptive kin relations. But the modern jurisprudence does not negate nor explain the origin of the  taboo .


Héritier explains Islamic juridical reckonings of milk kinship as the continuation of a somatic scheme of male filiative substances transmitted by lactation. [ 3 ]  But Parker critically interrogates its supposition of a peculiar Arab folk-physiology of lactation, whereby breast milk is supposed to be transformed male semen, yet mentions that Héritier has properly focused attention on evidently contested issues of 'patrifiliation' by breast-feeding, which remain to be understood. [ 2 ]  Parker posits that this somatic scheme seems to be unsubstantiated by current ethnographies, and also unwarranted in understanding the juridical reckoning of milk kinship that it purports to explain. [ 2 ] : 310


Weisner-Hanks mentions the introduction in the fifteenth century of prohibitions in the Christian  Canon Law , in which one is not allowed to marry any one suspected to be of respective kin. Individuals who shared godparents, and great grandparents were prohibited against marrying. The prohibitions against marriage also  extended to that of natural godparents. This was because both natural and 'foster' or 'spiritual' parents had an investment on the child's spiritual well being, which would not be achieved by going against Canon Law. [ 2 ] : 310   The practice of milk kinship is paralleled quite frequently, among scholarly works, with that of Christian godparent-hood or spiritual kinship. Parkes states that in both milk kinship and god-or co-parenthood "we deal with a fictitious kinship relationship between people of unequal status that is embedded in a long-term exchange of goods and services that we know as patronage". [ 5 ]  Iranians seemed to have "taken care to confine delegated suckling to subordinate non-kin – particularly those with whom marriage would be undesirable in any event". [ 2 ] : 322   Marriage taboos due to milk kinship were taken very seriously since some regarded breast milk to be refined female blood from the womb, thus conveying a 'uterine substance' of kinship. [ 2 ] : 314   Children who were milk kin to each other were prohibited to marry as well as two children from different parents who were suckled by the same woman. It was as much of a taboo to marry your milk-brother or -sister, as it was to marry a biological brother or sister. It is extremely important to understand that in all cases "What is forbidden by blood kinship is equally forbidden by milk kinship". [ 6 ]


In the  early modern period , milk kinship was widely practiced in many Arab countries for both religious and strategic purposes. Like the Christian practice of  godparenting , milk kinship established a second family that could take responsibility for a child whose biological parents came to harm. "Milk kinship in Islam thus appears to be a culturally distinctive, but by no means unique, institutional form of adoptive  kinship." [ 2 ] : 308


The childhood of the Islamic prophet,  Muhammad , illustrates the practice of traditional Arab milk kinship. In his early childhood, he was sent away to foster-parents amongst the  Bedouin . By nursing him,  Halimah bint Abdullah  became his "milk-mother". The rest of her family was drawn into the relationship as well: her husband al-Harith became Muhammad's "milk-father", and Muhammad was raised alongside their biological children as a "milk-brother". [ 2 ] : 309   This milk kinship creates a familial relationship, such that a man  may not marry  his milk-mother or his milk-sister (the daughter or milk-daughter of his milk-mother).


When  Crazy Horse , a 19th-century  Lakotan  chief, was a baby, he nursed at the breast of every woman in the tribe. The  Sioux  raised their children that way. Every warrior called every old woman in the tribe "Mother". Every old warrior, they called him "Grandfather". [ 7 ] : 309


In the  anthropological  study of  kinship , a  moiety  ( / ˈ m ɔɪ ə t i / ) is a  descent group  that coexists with only one other descent group within a  society . In such cases, the community usually has  unilineal descent  (either  patri-  or  matrilineal ) so that any individual belongs to one of the two moiety groups by birth, and all  marriages  take place between members of opposite moieties. It is an  exogamous    clan system  with only two clans. [ dubious  –  discuss ]


In the case of a patrilineal descent system, one can interpret a moiety system as one in which women are exchanged between the two moieties. Moiety societies operate particularly among the  indigenous peoples  of  North America ,   Australia  (see  Australian Aboriginal kinship  for details of Aboriginal moieties), [ 1 ] [ 2 ] [ 3 ]  and  Indonesia . [ 4 ] [ 5 ]


The word  moiety  comes from Latin  medietat- , meaning 'a half', through Anglo-Normal  moité . [ 6 ]


The  most royal candidate theory  of  Harold Brooks-Baker  proposed that the winning candidate in  United States presidential elections  had always been the candidate with the greatest percentage of " royal blood " in his pedigree, and this pattern could be used to predict the outcome of upcoming elections. Brooks-Baker promoted it during several election cycles, ending with the  2004 presidential election , the last before his death.


Every four years for a number of election cycles,  Harold Brooks-Baker  publicized his theory during the presidential election campaign, touring the talk circuit and expounding upon it. He gave examples of presidents whose losing opponents did not have royal blood ( Ronald Reagan  vs.  Walter Mondale ), or where he claimed the winner simply had "more royalty" ( John F. Kennedy  vs.  Richard Nixon ). [ 1 ]   Based on his theory, Brooks-Baker predicted that  John Kerry  would defeat the incumbent President  George W. Bush  in the  2004 presidential election  because while sharing a number of royal bloodlines Kerry had more royal ancestors than Bush. [ 2 ]  However, Bush was re-elected and Brooks-Baker died a few months later. [ 3 ]


Brooks-Baker was not known for the reliability of his information. His obituary in  The Daily Telegraph  would say of him: "His great advantage for journalists was that he was always available to make an arresting comment; his disadvantage was that he was often wrong." [ 4 ] [ 5 ]  Critics of the theory point out that perhaps a third of all Americans may be descended from  John, King of England  (ruled 1199–1216), and that the odds of being distantly related to other royalty are even higher. This is an effect of a phenomenon known as  pedigree collapse  which occurs due to the doubling of the number of a person's ancestors with each generation. In theory, each person has over one thousand ancestors after ten generations and one million after twenty, far exceeding the number of persons actually living in most regions at any point in time. In fact, most people are descended from the same ancestors multiple times through different lines while anyone living at the time of King John could have tens of millions of descendants in the present day. [ 6 ]


There remains a factual question as to whether the number of each candidate's royal ancestors or percentage of "royal blood" can be accurately estimated without being able to trace every branch of the candidate's family tree for an indefinite length. However, the relevance of such descent is also questioned due to the relatively small degree of inheritance a person receives from such distant ancestors. For instance, a person ten generations removed from a royal ancestor would have less than one thousandth of that ancestor's DNA and this amount would be halved with each subsequent generation. Thus, even if being a twenty-seventh generation descendant of King John could confer some advantage on a presidential contender, it is unclear how it would have any measurable effect. [ 7 ]


The central claim that until 2004 the winner was always the most royal is called into question by four instances in which successive elections were contested by the same two candidates, with different results. In  1800 ,  1828 ,  1840  and  1892 , the victorious candidate had lost to the same opponent in the previous election.


The conclusions of Brooks-Baker would be picked up by conspiracy theorist  David Icke  and incorporated into his formulation of a world history controlled by  Illuminati , whom he sees as a race of  reptilian  humanoids that includes the royal houses of Europe. [ 8 ] [ 9 ]


The  nine familial exterminations ,  nine kinship exterminations , or  execution of nine relations , also known by the names  zuzhu  ("family execution") and  miezu  ("family extermination"), was the most severe punishment for a  capital offense  in  premodern China ,  Korea , and  Vietnam . [ 1 ] [ 2 ] [ 3 ]  A  collective  form of  kin punishment  typically associated with offenses such as  treason , the punishment involved the execution of all relatives of an individual, which were categorized into nine groups. The occurrence of this punishment was somewhat rare, with relatively few sentences recorded throughout history.


The punishment involved the execution of close and extended family members. [ 3 ] [ 4 ]  These included:


Confucian  principles also played a major role in the extent of the punishment. The killing of children was disapproved under  Mencius 's principle that "being offspring is not a sin" ( Classical Chinese : 罪人不孥), so that children under a certain age were often spared execution.


The first written account of the concept is in the  Book of Documents , a historical account of the  Shang  (1600 BC – 1046 BC) and  Zhou  (1045 BC – 256 BC) dynasties, where it is recorded that prior to a military battle, officers would threaten their subordinates that they would exterminate their families if they refused to obey orders. [ 5 ]


From the  Spring and Autumn period  (770 BC – 403 BC), there are records of exterminations of "three clans" [ 2 ]  ( Chinese :  三族 ). A notable case was under the  State of Qin  in 338 BC: lawmaker  Shang Yang 's entire family was killed by order of  King Huiwen , [ 6 ]  while Shang Yang himself was sentenced to death by being  drawn and quartered . This was an ironic occurrence as it was Shang Yang who formulated such a punishment into Qin law in the first place, being commonly recorded as a lawmaker who used excessive punishments. [ 7 ] [ 8 ]


During the  Qin dynasty  (221 BC – 207 BC), punishments became even more rigorous under the first emperor of unified China,  Qin Shi Huang  (259 BC – 210 BC). In order to uphold his rule, strict laws were enforced, [ 9 ]  where deception,  libel , and the study of banned books became punishable by familial extermination. [ 1 ]  This increase in tyranny only helped to speed up the overthrow of the Qin dynasty. [ 5 ]


The  Han dynasty  (202 BC – 220 AD), although it inherited the concept of family execution, was more moderate in inflicting such severe punishments. In many cases, the Han emperor would retract the sentence, and so family executions were much rarer than under the Qin dynasty. [ 10 ]


During the  Tang dynasty  (618–907), the family punishment was not abolished, but it was only applied to those who plotted against the rule of the emperor. By this time, the penalty had become more regulated and different; from the  Tang Code , the sentence involved the death of parents, children over the age of sixteen, and other close kindred, and was only applied to the offenses of treason and rebellion. [ 1 ] [ 11 ]


Kublai Khan , the founder of the  Yuan dynasty  (1271–1368), executed the sons of the Muslim Persian finance minister  Ahmad Fanakati  after finding out about his corruption in the aftermath of his assassination in 1282.


During the  Ming  (1368–1644) and  Qing  (1644–1912) dynasties, the breadth of family extermination was increased. Under the  Hongwu Emperor  those committing rebellion and treason were punished by having their parents, grandparents, brethren (by birth, as well as "sworn brothers"), children, grandchildren, those living with the criminal regardless of surname, uncles, and the children of brethren put to death, as well as death for the rebels themselves by  lingchi . [ 12 ] [ 13 ]  The number of sentences during the Ming was higher than that of the Tang, [ 14 ] [ 15 ]  due to the policy of "showing mercy beneath the sword" ( Chinese :  刀下留情 ), while females were given the choice to become  slaves  rather than be killed. A rare case was  Fang Xiaoru , whose students and friends were also executed as the 10th family kin by the  Yongle Emperor , the only case where "ten exterminations" was officially sentenced and carried out.


The punishment by family extermination during the  Qing dynasty  was a direct imitation of the regulation under the Ming. [ 16 ]  On 1 November 1728, after the Qing reconquest of Lhasa in  Tibet , several Tibetan rebels were killed along with their families by Qing  Manchu  officers and officials. [ 17 ] [ 18 ] [ 19 ] [ 20 ] [ 21 ]  Punishment by nine exterminations was abolished near the end of the Qing dynasty, [ when? ]  and was officially repealed by the imperial government in 1905.


There were various ethical judgements regarding group punishment in ancient times. It was typically seen as a tyrannical method of rule, unjustly punishing innocent family members for the crime of a relative. Like all forms of collective punishment, it was also intended as a dreadful  deterrent  for the worst crimes, rather than merely as a form of revenge.


In ancient Korea, this punishment was applied during the reign of King  Jinpyeong of Silla  when conspirator Yi Chan-chil-suk (이찬칠숙) and his entire family and relatives to the ninth degree were put to death. [ 22 ] [ 23 ] [ 24 ]


In Vietnam, the most prominent example is the execution of most of the family members of  Nguyễn Trãi , an official who was wrongly accused of killing the king. He had his entire family executed. [ 25 ]


In ancient times, there were  nine different relations  (or  guanxi ) that an individual had with other people, which were referred to as the "family" or "tribe" ( Chinese :  族 ). [ 26 ]  These relations, under Confucian principles, were bonded by  filial piety . Because members of a family remained strictly loyal to one another, they were considered responsible for crimes committed by any member due to  guilt by association . It also provided the argument that the entire family would be responsible in supporting each other in the case of a rebellion against a ruler.


The Chinese character  族  can be translated by its original definition of "clan" or "tribe", or it can have the additional meanings of "kinship", "family" (as in  家族 ), or "ethnicity" (as in  民族 ).


In  genetics , a  non-paternity event  (also known as  misattributed paternity ,  not parent expected , or  NPE ) occurs when an individual's presumed father is not in fact their  biological father . This is a type of misattributed parentage experience (MPE) which can involve inaccurate assumptions made by an individual, their parents, or medical professionals. An NPE may result from  sperm donation ,  closed adoption ,  heteropaternal superfecundation ,  promiscuity ,  paternity fraud ,  sexual assault , or medical errors during the process of  assisted reproduction  such as mixups during procedures such as  in vitro fertilization  and  artificial insemination . [ 1 ]  Where there is uncertainty, the most reliable technique for establishing paternity is through  genetic testing . Currently, there are many direct-to-consumer companies that offer  paternity testing . Internationally, June 27 is recognized as NPE Awareness Day.  [ 2 ]


The term non-paternity event was first used in 2000 in a study of the surname "Skyes" and the Y-chromosome haplotype to denote if non-Skyes males had been introduced into the family line. [ 3 ]  Bellis et al. (2005) stated that non-paternity "occurs when a child is believed to have been fathered by the husband (or partner) but is actually the child of another man." [ 1 ]  Non-paternity events are also sometimes referred to as  paternity, paternal discrepancy or false paternity. Although it is sometimes referred to as  paternity fraud , that suggests that the misattribution was deliberate, rather than accidental. [ 4 ]  In a scientific review of non-paternity studies since the 1950s, Bellis et al. (2005) stated that knowingly covering up an accidental pregnancy that resulted from infidelity is often assumed to be the reason for non-paternity but that there are many other reasons: "for example, where sex with the long term partner has not produced children a woman might seek conception elsewhere."  Other reasons include  closed adoption , accidental misattribution resulting from multiple relationships in close succession as well as medical mistakes, such as mixups during procedures such as  in vitro fertilization  and  artificial insemination . [ 1 ]


In  genetic genealogy , the term non-paternity is often used in a wider context to indicate a break in the link between the  Y-chromosome  and the surname. Such a breakage may occur because of formal or informal adoption, premarital or extramarital intercourse or rape; a woman raising a grandchild as her own to cover for her unwed daughter's pregnancy or when individuals use a different surname than their biological father, such as their mother's maiden name, a stepfather's name, the use of aliases or a legal name change. [ 5 ]


Genetic testing  is the most reliable method to establish paternity, although rare errors can occur due to genetic mutations or misinterpretation of test results. However, genetic testing is based on probabilities and is not always definitive. Jones et al. (2010) said, "Characteristics of the markers and the fact that they are analyzed by fallible humans can result in inconsistencies that present problems for parentage analysis." False negatives may occur due to low-quality samples,  gene mutations , or  genotyping  errors (when a  genotype  is misread or inaccurately scored). There is a higher probability of accuracy when DNA from both parents can be tested. The accuracy increases even more when DNA from a sibling is available. [ 6 ]


Overall, the incidence of misattributed parentage experiences ranges from about 0.4% to 5.9%, [ 7 ]  though it may be higher in certain populations. For example, in a United States sample of nearly 24,000 users of FamilyTreeDNA, 3% reported an NPE result. [ 8 ]  The discovery of previously unsuspected or undisclosed non-paternity may lead to social, psychological, and medical consequences. [ 9 ]  Non-paternity is medically relevant when interpreting the results and utility of genetic screening for  hereditary illnesses . However, the requirements for consent and counseling vary by country. [ 10 ]


The rise of  direct-to-consumer genetic testing  (DTC GT) has resulted in consumers learning about their NPE. This often leads to significant psychological and familial implications. [ 9 ]  Results from DTC GT tests, such as  23andMe , may provide this information in the form of a DNA Relatives results page which shows the name of the consumer that you are related to, and your presumed relationship based on the percentage of shared DNA, including the amount of shared DNA segments. [ 11 ]  When viewing this information, if one's presumed parent is not listed, or another parent is listed whom the consumer does not know, one may learn of their NPE.


Experiences of learning about one's NPE has been captured in the news. For example, In a  Wall Street Journal  article, several people who learned about their NPE through DTC GT discussed how discovering their biological parent’s identity affected their sense of self and broader familial relationships, sparking difficult questions about whether parents should disclose to their children that they were donor conceived. [ 12 ]  Similarly, in  The New York Times , two Canadian men discovered that they were switched at birth from DTC GT. [ 13 ]  Researchers have picked up on this phenomenon, and have sought to identify news outlets articulate how people discuss DTC GT. Specifically, in one paper the authors found that out of 100 news articles, nearly 79% of them discussed identifying new family members. [ 14 ]


Experiences of learning about one's NPE has also been written about in books. Some of the relevant books include:


It is difficult to accurately estimate the incidence of non-paternity events, and there have been large discrepancies in the research published on the topic. Often, data on non-paternity rates are reported tangentially to the primary goal of research without sufficient detail, and very few studies involve randomized samples. As such, it is not possible to make valid generalizations based on a large portion of the available literature. [ 19 ]  Bellis et al. (2005) found that between 1950 and 2004, the rates of non-paternity events published in scientific journals ranged from 0.8% to 30% with a median of 3.7%. [ 1 ]  According to a study published in the  Lancet , "High rates have been quoted, but are often unsupported by any published evidence or based on unrepresentative population samples." [ 19 ]


Turi King  and Mark Jobling of the Department of Genetics at  University of Leicester  called the commonly cited 30% rate of non-paternity an "urban myth." [ 20 ]  According to King and Jobling, the figure is really around 2%. They also stated that non-paternity events is often impacted by cultural and socioeconomic factors and that it occurs more frequently among unmarried couples. [ 21 ]  The sociologist Michael Gilding concluded that inflated figures have been circulated by the  media , the  paternity testing industry ,  fathers' rights activists  and  evolutionary psychologists . [ 22 ] [ 23 ]  He traced many of those overestimates back to a 1972 conference at which non-paternity rates as high as 30% were discussed. [ 24 ]  Gilding states that those data show only the incidence of non-paternity in which disputed parentage was the reason for paternity testing. [ 1 ] [ 25 ]  In situations that disputed parentage was the reason for the paternity testing, there were higher levels with an incidence of 17% to 33% (median of 26.9%). Most at risk of parental discrepancy were those born to younger parents, to unmarried couples and those of lower socio-economic status or from certain ethnic and cultural groups. [ 1 ]


Rarely, genetic testing has revealed children from  multiple births  to have different fathers, which is known as  heteropaternal superfecundation . One study estimated that the incidence of bipaternal twins born to white women in the United States is around one pair in 400. [ 26 ]  Another study found the prevalence to be approximately one pair in 13,000 cases. [ 27 ]


The concept of  nurture kinship  in the anthropological study of human social relationships ( kinship ) highlights the extent to which such relationships are brought into being through the performance of various acts of  nurture  between individuals. Additionally the concept highlights ethnographic findings that, in a wide swath of human societies, people understand, conceptualize and symbolize their relationships predominantly in terms of giving, receiving and sharing nurture. The concept stands in contrast to the earlier anthropological concepts of human kinship relations being fundamentally based on "blood ties", some other form of shared substance, or a proxy for these (as in  fictive kinship ), and the accompanying notion that people universally understand their social relationships predominantly in these terms.


The nurture kinship perspective on the ontology of social ties, and how people conceptualize them, has become stronger in the wake of  David M. Schneider 's influential  Critique of the Study of Kinship [ 1 ]  and Holland's subsequent  Social Bonding and Nurture Kinship , demonstrating that as well as the ethnographic record,  biological theory and evidence  also more strongly support the  nurture  perspective than the  blood  perspective ( see   Human inclusive fitness ). Both Schneider and Holland argue that the earlier  blood  theory of kinship derived from an unwarranted extension of symbols and values from anthropologists' own cultures (see  ethnocentrism ).


Reports of kinship ties being based on various forms of shared nurture date back at least to  William Robertson Smith 's (1889) compiled  Lectures on The Religion of the Semites :


According to antique ideas, those who eat and drink together are by this very act tied to one another by a bond of friendship and mutual obligation... The idea that kinship is not purely an affair of birth, but may be acquired, has quite fallen out of our circle of ideas. (Robertson Smith 1889, 265, 273) [ 2 ]


At this stage, Robertson Smith interpreted the kinship ties emerging from the  sharing of food  as constituting an alternative form of the sharing of substance, aside from the sharing of blood or genetic substance which many anthropologists (e.g.  Lewis H. Morgan ) assumed was the 'natural basis' of social ties. However, later observations focused on the  nurturing  qualities of food-sharing behavior, allowing a potential distinction between the earlier emphasis on kinship as shared  substance  (e.g. food or blood) and kinship as  performance  (of care-giving or nurturing behaviors):


I want to examine the human relationships of a  primitive society  as determined by nutritional needs, showing how hunger shapes the sentiments which bind together the members of each social group. By what means is this fundamental biological want fulfilled in a given  environment; and what forms of human activities and social groupings are so derived? (Richards 1932, 23) [ 3 ]


Sometimes the line between conceiving of kinship as  substance  or as  nurture  is blurred by using both concepts. For example, the substance of food or milk may be conceived as the medium or vehicle through which the nurturing behavior is performed (e.g. Strathern 1973). The notion that it is  the nurturing acts themselves  that create social ties between people has developed most noticeably since the 1970s:


The Navajo never mention common substance in finding or invoking kinship ties or norms. Kinship is defined in terms of the acts of giving birth and sharing sustenance. The primary bond in the Navajo kinship system is the mother-child bond, and it is in this bond that the nature and meaning of kinship become clear. In Navajo culture, kinship means intense, diffuse, and enduring solidarity, and this  solidarity  is  realized  in  actions  and  behavior befitting the cultural definitions of kinship solidarity. Just as a mother is one who gives life to her children through birth and sustains their life by providing them with loving care, assistance,  protection,  and  sustenance,  kinsmen  are  those  who  sustain  each other's life by helping one another, protecting one another, and by the giving or sharing of food and other items of subsistence. Where this kind of solidarity exists, kinship exists; where it does not, there is no kinship. (Witherspoon 1975, 21–22) [ 4 ]


The term "nurture kinship" may have been first used in the present context by Watson (1983), [ 5 ]  who contrasted it with "nature kinship" (kinship concepts built upon shared substance of some kind). Since the 1970s, an increasing number of  ethnographies  have documented the extent to which social ties in various cultures can be understood to be built upon nurturant acts. [ 6 ]


Marshall on the  Trukese  (now known as the Chuukese) of  Micronesia :


All sibling relationships – natural or created – involve the height of sharing and "feelings of strong sentimental attachment." ... In Trukese kinship, actions speak louder than words; ttong must be demonstrated by nurturant acts. Trukese kinship pivots on the fulcrum of nurturance, a fact partially understood by Ruth Goodenough (1970:331) who noted the "intense concentration on problems of nurture – taking care of and being cared for by others" in GTS. Nurture is the nature of Trukese kinship. (Marshall 1977, 656) [ 7 ]


Gow on the  Piro  of  Amazonia :


As a child begins to eat real  food, and to walk and eventually to talk, its relationship to its parents changes from one in which the parents take care that their physical connection to the body of the child does not harm it, into one in which gifts of food, given out of love for the child, evoke the child's love for its parents and other kin. Older siblings are very important here. From birth, the baby is frequently picked up and held (marcar, "to hold in the arms") by its older brothers and sisters. As it learns to walk and talk, its closest physical ties are with such  siblings,  for  they  are  its  constant  companions  and  they  eat  and  sleep together. Such intimate ties with siblings replace the earlier one with parents as the child grows. (Gow, 1991, 157) [ 8 ]


Thomas on the Temanambondro of  Madagascar :


Yet just  as  fathers  are  not  simply  made  by  birth,  neither  are  mothers,  and although mothers  are  not  made  by  "custom" they,  like  fathers,  can make themselves  through  another  type  of  performatively  constituted  relation,  the giving of "nurture". Relations of ancestry are particularly important in contexts of ritual,  inheritance and  the  defining  of marriageability  and  incest;  they  are  in effect  the  "structuring  structures" (Bourdieu  1977)  of  social reproduction  and intergenerational continuity.  Father, mother and children are, however,  also performatively related through the giving and receiving of "nurture" (fitezana). Like ancestry, relations of "nurture" do not always coincide with relations by birth; but unlike ancestry, "nurture" is a largely ungendered relation, constituted in contexts of everyday practical existence, in the intimate, familial and familiar world of the household, and in ongoing relations of work and consumption, of feeding and farming. (Thomas 1999, 37) [ 9 ]


Storrie on the Hoti of  Venezuelan Guiana :


It was my Hoti friends who, through their rejection of my expectations that I would be able to "collect" genealogical information, brought me to the idea that dwelling together and particularly the notions of consumption and ingestion are, for them, fundamental to social identity. Whenever I attempted to discover if there were ideas of genealogical relatedness between kin, I was told that there is nothing that links a parent to their children, or siblings to each other, apart from the bonds of affection and sentiment that they feel for each other. In other words, there is  nothing more to "relatedness" than  those  things  that link "all people" together. (Storrie 2003, 420) [ 10 ]


Viegas on a Bahian Amerindian Community in Brazil:


Adults  who  early  in  their  lives  had  been taken to become raised children [fostered] state clearly  that  the  situation  had  never  displeased  them. They maintain that they belong to the woman who cared for or raised them, and it is to her that they want their children to become attached. Although they recognise who their  pais legítimos  are, it is those who have cared for a person for a longer period of their childhood that are considered mother and father. It is in this sense that  kinship is constituted  as  memory of  being  related through  caring  and feeding, along the lines developed in large part by Peter Gow and within other South Amerindian contexts. (de Matos Viegas 2003, 32) [ 11 ]


It can be seen from the ethnographies that several anthropologists have found that describing social ties in terms of emotional attachments is appropriate. This has prompted some to suggest that an inter-disciplinary collaboration might be useful:


Bowlby   argued  that   attachment behaviour in humans and other animals is instinctive , i.e. that evolutionary pressures have selected this psychological trait. ... Now: might Bowlby's realist approach – which defines these behaviours as universal and instinctive, which examines their consequences through naturalistic observation, and which stresses their central role in intensifying human relatedness – be a useful starting  point  for  anthropologists? ...  Extrapolating from the work of Myers [on emotions], one could make the case that  all  anthropological discussions of relatedness – e.g. the accounts by Malinowsky, Mauss, and a great many others of the ways in which gift exchange and reciprocity, or commensality and the sharing of "substance", help to constitute human relatedness – are also by definition, dealing with intractable problems of attachment and separation in social life. (Stafford 2000, 12,24; emphasis in original) [ 12 ]


Within the discipline of  psychology , the formation of social and emotional ties are treated by attachment theory. Drawing on animal studies from the 1950s onwards, John Bowlby [ 13 ]  and colleagues described how—for all primates, including humans—the reliable provision of nurture and care leads to strong bonds of attachment between the carer and cared-for.


Attachment theorists now suggest that infants are biologically predisposed to emit signals such as tracking visually, crying, smiling, vocalising, clinging, etc., to elicit nurturance and proximity not only to their mother, but also to their father or  any  other  caregiver  (Ainsworth,  Bell  &  Stayton,  1974;  Lamb,  1978b). Consistent and prompt responding to infants' signals leads to infants'  perception of adults as concerned, predictable, and reliable, and to the formation of secure attachment. Mothers, fathers and  other  caregivers,  by  their  different  styles  of responding,  create  a  different  set  of  expectations  and  an  array of  attachment relationships  of  various  qualities  and  flavours  (Bretherton,  1985;  Bridges, Connell & Belsky, 1988; Stroufe, 1988). (Geiger 1996, 6) [ 14 ]


Following the nurture kinship approach thus allows a synthesis [ 6 ]  between the extensive cross-cultural data of ethnographers and the long-standing findings of psychology on the nature of human bonding and emotional ties.


David Schneider suspected that the traditional anthropological models of  blood kinship  were not mirrored by the "scientific facts of biology".


The last few pages of my book, American Kinship, make the point that the biological elements have a symbolic significance. They constitute an integrated set of symbols in the sense that they are a model for how  life, in certain of its aspects, is constituted and should be lived. The symbols are 'biological' in the sense that the culturally given definition of the symbol system is that it is derived from the facts of biology as a process of nature itself. But it is fundamental to our understanding that we appreciate that these biological elements are symbols and that their symbolic referents are not biology as a natural process at all.
It is even a moot question as to whether the symbols derive from the facts of nature and  the facts of biology as these can be determined scientifically. What is indisputable is that the symbols are formed of elements which in native culture are defined as biological, particularly as aspects of the reproductive process. What is disputable is whether they in fact derive from, or mirror, or are models formed after the scientific facts of biology. I do not think that they are, but this subject is best left to another time. (Schneider 1972, 45, 62) [ 15 ]


Holland subsequently showed [ 6 ]  that Schneider's intuition in regard to the 'scientific facts' was correct. In  evolutionary biology , the theory treating the evolution of social cooperation emerged in a formal version in the 1960s and 1970s in the form of  inclusive fitness  theory, and a related theory,  kin selection . The theory specifies that one criterion for the evolution of certain kinds of social traits is a statistical association of identical genes, as would exist when close genetic relatives associate with one another. Early applications of the theory applied to humans ( darwinian anthropology ) took as their starting position the former anthropological perspective that human kinship is fundamentally "based on" blood-ties. However, these extensions emerged at precisely the time that anthropology was reflexively critiquing this "blood" assumption behind traditional kinship theorizing. This reversion to "blood" led some anthropologists to strongly attack the emerging biological perspectives as suffering the same ethnocentric assumptions (e.g., "blood is thicker than water") that the anthropologists themselves had recently eschewed.


This clash of perspectives led to something of a stand-off and a lack of communication between the disciplines, resulting in little cooperation and progress for three decades. The stand-off was resolved by Holland's  Social Bonding and Nurture Kinship [ 6 ]  which re-visited biological inclusive fitness theory to draw a distinction between the statistical evolutionary mechanisms for the emergence of social traits and the non-deterministic proximate mechanisms through which they are expressed. In a strict interpretation of the theory, a statistical association of related genes (as would be present in the interactions of close genetic relatives) is understood as a necessary (though not sufficient) condition for the evolutionary emergence of certain traits relating to social cooperation (see  kin selection ). However, this does not entail that the proximate mechanisms governing the  expression  of such social traits in primates and humans necessarily depends on (or are determined by) conditions of genetic relatedness  per se . For the vast majority of social mammals—including primates and humans—the formation of social bonds (and the resulting social cooperation) are based on familiarity from an early developmental stage, and the same kinds of mechanisms that attachment theorists (see above) have outlined. In short, in humans and in other primates, genetic relatedness is not necessary for the attachment bonds to develop, and it is the performance of nurture that underlies such bonds and the enduring social cooperation that typically accompanies them (see  Social Bonding and Nurture Kinship ).
Therefore, the nurture kinship perspective leads to the synthesis of evolutionary biology, psychology, and socio-cultural anthropology on the topic of social bonding and cooperation, without  reductionism  or positing a deterministic role to genes or genetic relatedness in the mechanisms through which  social behaviors  are expressed.


According to Hamilton's rule, kin selection causes genes to increase in frequency when the genetic relatedness of a recipient to an actor multiplied by the benefit to the recipient is greater than the reproductive cost to the actor. [ 16 ] [ 17 ]  Hamilton proposed two mechanisms for kin selection. First,  kin recognition  allows individuals to be able to identify their relatives. Second, in viscous populations, populations in which the movement of organisms from their place of birth is relatively slow, local interactions tend to be among relatives by default. The viscous population mechanism makes kin selection and social cooperation possible in the absence of kin recognition. In this case, nurture kinship, the interaction between related individuals, simply as a result of living in each other's proximity, is sufficient for kin selection, given reasonable assumptions about population dispersal rates. Note that kin selection is not the same thing as  group selection , where  natural selection  is believed to act on the group as a whole.


In humans, altruism is both more likely and on a larger scale with kin than with unrelated individuals; for example, humans give presents according to how closely related they are to the recipient. In other species,  vervet monkeys  use  allomothering , where related females such as older sisters or grandmothers often care for young, according to their relatedness. The social shrimp  Synalpheus regalis  protects juveniles within highly related colonies.


Therefore, the nurture kinship perspective enables common ground between evolutionary biology, psychology, and socio-cultural anthropology on the topic of social bonding and cooperation, without  reductionism  or positing a deterministic role to genes or genetic relatedness in the mechanisms through which  social behaviors  are expressed.


In all of the above examples that are argued to support the 'nurture kinship' perspective, alternative interpretations may be equally persuasive or more insightful. In many such small communities, which may be isolated (such as the ones of the Chuuk of Micronesia), the relatedness between members of a group is to be assumed. This may also be the case for an amerindian tribe (such as the Hoti of Guyana, and the Bahian Amerindians). So it can be argued that those bonds of affection are what naturally link parents to children exactly because of their existing relatedness.


In many of these cases, even if 'symbolic valuation' (and explicit recognition) of blood is not present, most of the time nurturing may anyway be concentrated between (blood) siblings (e.g. the Piro of Amazonia). In the case of the Temanambondro of Madagascar, as in the above case of the Navajo, nurturing is a complementary element of kin-familial and social life and not an antithesis of it. Likewise, in the Bahain Amerindian (Brazil) case of fostering, the recognition of their legitimate parents does not cease to be made, and it is not rejected. Such attachment is only seen, however, in the perspective of the offspring, rather than in the one of the progenitors.


These samples show common elements between them but also with cases in other, including Western civilizacional (where milk or breastfeeding siblings and exposed children were common for centuries [ further explanation needed ] ), similar cases where children are not able to be nurtured by their own birth parents but are nurtured by someone else, but they do not say in themselves that parents in general are not attached, in normal conditions, to their offspring, or if that is a common situation.


These ethnographic examples correspond to a small minority of the World's population. In many cultures, people often value and even pay respect to deceased ancestors they never met, as well as a beloved parent they don't know without being his or her fault. Also, feelings towards relatives should be seen as a more personal and individual issue and particular circumstances be hold into account instead of a common whole-group mentality. Situations where the bond between kindred is broken are also the exception rather than the rule.


Overall the 'nurture kinship' perspective does not necessarily mean that human non-blood relationships such as the relationships based on nurturing are more important than the ones based on blood-kinship, since their motivation is also related to one's survival and perpetuation, or that people are necessarily bound to the culture they are inserted in, nor can it be generalized to the point of claiming all individuals always undervalue blood-kinship in the absence of nurturing. In those cases, attachment to others is not a cultural act but an act of survival.  Herbert Gintis , in his review of the book  Sex at Dawn , critiques the idea that human males were unconcerned with parentage, "which would make us unlike any other species I can think of". [ 18 ]   Pascal Boyer , in his work "Minds make Societies", presents that anthropologists tell us that biological fathers everywhere have some connection to their children — so it would seem that there are common features to human families after all. [ 19 ]  Accusations of ethnocentrism become somewhat misplaced when it is realized that most ethnic groups in the world naturally value their offspring.


A study has shown that humans are about as genetically equivalent to their friends as they are their fourth cousins. [ 20 ]


Omaha kinship  is the  system  of terms and relationships used to define  family  in  Omaha  tribal culture. Identified by  Lewis Henry Morgan  in his 1871 work  Systems of Consanguinity and Affinity of the Human Family , the Omaha system is one of the six major kinship systems ( Eskimo ,  Hawaiian ,  Iroquois ,  Crow , Omaha, and  Sudanese ) [ 1 ]  which he identified internationally.


In function, the system is extremely similar to the  Crow system . But, whereas Crow groups are  matrilineal , Omaha descent groups are characteristically  patrilineal .


In this system, relatives are sorted according to their descent and their gender. Ego's father and his brothers are merged and addressed by a single term, and a similar pattern is seen for Ego's mother and her sisters. (Marriages take place among people of different  gentes  or  clans  in the tribe.)


Like most other kinship systems, Omaha kinship distinguishes between  parallel and cross-cousins .  While parallel cousins are merged by term and addressed the same as Ego's siblings, cross-cousins are differentiated by generational divisions. On the maternal side, cross-cousins are raised a generation (making them Ego's Mother's Brother and Ego's Mother), while those on the paternal side are lowered a generation (making them the generational equivalent of Ego's Children).


The system is similar to that of  Iroquois kinship . It uses  bifurcate merging , but only the Iroquois system uses bifurcate merging as a label. In addition, Iroquois kinship is a matrilineal system.


The system is named for the  Omaha , a  Native American  tribe historically located on the Northern Plains in present-day  Nebraska .  The Omaha system has been found among some  indigenous  groups of  Mexico , the  Mapuche  people of  Chile  and  Argentina , the  Dani  tribe of  Indonesia , the  Shona  of  Zimbabwe [ 2 ] , the  Igbo  of  Nigeria  and is proposed to be reconstructuted for  indoeuropean kinship . [ 3 ]


The  one-drop rule  was a legal principle of  racial classification  that was prominent in the 20th-century United States. It asserted that any person with even one ancestor of  African ancestry  ("one drop" of "black blood") [ 1 ] [ 2 ]  is considered black ( Negro  or  colored  in historical terms). It is an example of  hypodescent , the automatic assignment of children of a mixed union between different socioeconomic or ethnic groups to the group with the lower status, regardless of proportion of ancestry in different groups. [ 3 ]


This concept became codified into the law of some U.S. states in the early 20th century. [ 4 ]  It was associated with the principle of "invisible blackness" [ 5 ]  that developed after the long history of racial interaction in the  South , which had included the hardening of  slavery  as a racial  caste system  and later  segregation . Before the rule was outlawed by the Supreme Court in the  Loving v. Virginia  decision of 1967, it was used to prevent interracial marriages and in general to deny rights and equal opportunities and uphold  white supremacy .


Before the  American Civil War , free individuals of mixed race ( free people of color ) were considered legally white if they had less than either one-eighth or  one-quarter African ancestry  (only in Virginia). [ 6 ]  Many mixed-race people were absorbed into the majority culture based simply on appearance, associations and carrying out community responsibilities. These and community acceptance were the more important factors if a person's racial status were questioned, not their documented ancestry.


Based on late 20th-century  DNA  analysis and a preponderance of historical evidence, US president  Thomas Jefferson  is widely believed to have fathered the six  mixed-race  children with his slave  Sally Hemings , who was herself three-quarters white and a paternal half-sister of his wife  Martha Wayles Jefferson . [ quote 1 ]  Four of them survived to adulthood. [ 7 ]  Under Virginia law of the time, while their seven-eighths European ancestry would have made them legally white if they'd been free, being  born to an enslaved mother  made them automatically enslaved from birth. Jefferson allowed the two oldest to escape in 1822 (freeing them legally was a public action he elected to avoid because he would have had to gain permission from the state legislature); the two youngest he freed in his 1826 will. Three of the four entered white society as adults. Subsequently, their descendants identified as white.


Although  racial segregation  was adopted legally by southern states of the former Confederacy in the late 19th century, legislators resisted defining race by law as part of preventing interracial marriages. In 1895, in  South Carolina  during discussion,  George D. Tillman  said,


It is a scientific fact that there is not one full-blooded Caucasian on the floor of this convention. Every member has in him a certain mixture of ... colored blood .... It would be a cruel injustice and the source of endless litigation, of scandal, horror, feud, and bloodshed to undertake to annul or forbid marriage for a remote, perhaps obsolete trace of Negro blood. The doors would be open to scandal, malice, and greed. [ 8 ]


The one-drop rule was not formally codified as law until the 20th century, from 1910 in  Tennessee  to 1930 as one of  Virginia 's  "racial integrity laws" , with similar laws in several other states in between.


Prior to colonization, and still in traditional communities, the idea of determining belonging by degree of "blood" was, and is, unheard of. Native American tribes did not use blood quantum law until the U.S. government introduced the  Indian Reorganization Act  of 1934, instead determining tribal status on the basis of kinship, lineage and family ties. [ 9 ]  However, many land cession treaties, particularly during  Indian removal  in the 19th century, contained provisions for " mixed-blood " descendants of European and native ancestry to receive either parcels of land ceded in the treaty, or a share in a lump sum of money, with specifications as to the degree of tribal ancestry required to qualify. Though these did not typically apply a one-drop rule, determining the ancestry of individual claimants was not straightforward, and the process was often rife with fraud. [ 10 ]


Among  patrilineal  tribes, such as the  Omaha , historically a child born to an Omaha mother and a white father could belong officially to the Omaha tribe only if the child were formally adopted into it by a male citizen. [ note 1 ]  In contemporary practice, tribal laws around citizenship and parentage can vary widely between nations.


Between 1904 and 1919, tribal members  with any amount of African ancestry  were  disenrolled  from the  Chitimacha  tribe of Louisiana, and their descendants have since then been denied tribal membership. [ 12 ]


In 20th-century America, the concept of the one-drop rule has been primarily applied by European Americans to those of native  African  ancestry, when some Whites were trying to maintain some degree of overt or covert  white supremacy . The poet  Langston Hughes  wrote in his 1940 memoir:


You see, unfortunately, I am not black. There are lots of different kinds of blood in our family. But here in the United States, the word 'Negro' is used to mean anyone who has any native  African  blood at all in his veins. In Africa, the word is more pure. It means all African, therefore black. I am brown. [ 13 ]


This rule meant many mixed-race people, of diverse ancestry, were simply seen as African-American, and their more diverse ancestors forgotten and erased, making it difficult to accurately trace ancestry in the present day.


Many descendants of those who were enslaved native Africans and trafficked by Europeans and Americans have assumed they have  Native American  ancestry.  Henry Louis Gates Jr. 's 2006  PBS  documentary on the genetic makeup of African Americans,  African American Lives , focused on these stories of Native American heritage in African-American communities.  DNA test  results showed, after African, primarily European ancestors for all but two of the celebrities interviewed. [ 14 ]  However, many critics point to the limitations of DNA testing for ancestry, especially for minority populations. [ 15 ] [ 16 ] [ 17 ]


During World War II, Colonel  Karl Bendetsen  stated that anyone with "one drop of Japanese blood" was liable for  forced internment in camps . [ 18 ]


Today there are no enforceable laws in the U.S. in which the one-drop rule is applicable. Sociologically, however, while the concept has in recent years become less acceptable within the Black community, with more people identifying as biracial, research has found that in White society, it is still common to associate biracial children primarily with the individual's non-White ancestry. [ 1 ] [ 19 ]


Both before and after the  American Civil War , many people of mixed ancestry who "looked white" and were of mostly white ancestry were legally absorbed into the white majority. State laws established differing standards. For instance, an 1822 Virginia law stated that to be defined as  mulatto  (that is, multi-racial), a person had to have at least one-quarter (equivalent to one grandparent) African ancestry. [ 6 ] : 68   Social acceptance and identity were historically the keys to racial identity. Virginia's one-fourth standard remained in place until 1910, when the standard was changed to one sixteenth. In  1930 , even the one sixteenth standard was abandoned in favor of a more stringent standard. The act defined a person as legally "colored" (black) for classification and legal purposes if the individual had  any  African ancestry.


Although the Virginia legislature increased restrictions on free blacks following the  Nat Turner's Rebellion  of 1831, it refrained from establishing a one-drop rule. When a proposal was made by  Travis H. Eppes  and debated in 1853, representatives realized that such a rule could adversely affect whites, as they were aware of  generations of interracial relationships . During the debate, a person wrote to the  Charlottesville  newspaper:


[If a one-drop rule were adopted], I doubt not, if many who are reputed to be white, and are in fact so, do not in a very short time find themselves instead of being elevated, reduced by the judgment of a court of competent jurisdiction, to the level of a free negro. [ 6 ] : 230


The state legislators agreed. No such law was passed until 1924, apparently assisted by the fading recollection of such mixed familial histories. In the 21st century, such interracial family histories are being revealed as individuals undergo DNA genetic analysis.


The  Melungeons  are a group of multiracial families of mostly European and African ancestry whose ancestors were free in colonial Virginia. They migrated to the frontier in Kentucky and Tennessee. Their descendants have been documented over the decades as having tended to marry persons classified as "white". [ 20 ]  Their descendants became assimilated into the majority culture from the 19th to the 20th centuries.


Pursuant to Reconstruction later in the 19th century, southern states acted to impose racial segregation by law and restrict the liberties of blacks, specifically passing laws to exclude them from politics and voting. From 1890 to 1908, all of the former Confederate states passed such laws, and most preserved disfranchisement until after passage of federal civil rights laws in the 1960s. At the South Carolina constitutional convention in 1895, an anti- miscegenation  law and changes that would  disfranchise  blacks were proposed. Delegates debated a proposal for a one-drop rule to include in these laws.  George D. Tillman  said the following in opposition: