ABSTRACT
This chapter demonstrates the general features of kinship as generated by this particular set of demographic parameters. There is a basic kinship inventory generated by demographic processes, and simulation allows us to count ties in that basic inventory.AMBUSH actually counts the numbers of ties between living individuals. The data presentation figures of this chapter are designed to display the several kinds of variability in distributions of kin ties. The discussion starts with the distribution of frequency of having a living mother, as it is one of the most important relationships among kin. The chapter discusses the formation and maintenance of kin ties summing them as though they are all equally important. One of the general observations brought out by the simulations is the frequency of simultaneously living generations in a population like the !Kung. The usefulness of the simulated distributions derives in part from the ease of obtaining them in comparison with the substantial cost of counting kin in a real population.
