"Full Blooded"

[NPG]

If I might return to the original post of the thread. I am a historian, by training and trade. I did my undergraduate work on the image of the Highlander as a Scottish National Symbol. This was some years ago around the start of the devolution process in Scotland. So this is a topic that I have long held an interest in.

Like most European nations and likely all nations the people are a mixture of many cultures and "peoples" including Picts, Gaels, Norse, Normans and likely even some Brittonic peoples from the former kingdom of Alcclud.

My own investigation of my ancestry takes me to the isles (Skye and Lewis) where the outer Hebrides even attained the name Innse Gall (islands of strangers). What fascinates me, is here in the isles at times you had a culture that was aligned more with Scandinavia than either of the power centers nearer to it (Scotland's mainland and Ireland). So not only do we have veritable melting pots in many of these places in Europe, but they shift their political and cultural leanings at times as well, making the traditional North-South maps not quite adequate to express these connections.

But it wasn't just in Scotland heck, England started out as Celts who were Romanized, then successively conquered by the Anglo-Saxons, Norse (in part) and then the Normans. The Normans are Francafied (not sure if I should coin that) Norse. The French themselves are descended from Gauls who were Romanized and then conquered by Germans.

Recent DNA research seems to suggest that the once thought "pure" Homo-Sapien likely interbred with Neanderthals and Denisovans. So it would appear that "full blooded" from a genetic or even cultural standpoint never really existed.

That being said, the term full blooded probably does derive from the genealogical context, or even from the live stock concept of "pure bred".