However, although patrilineality was the most common method for reckoning ancestry, there were many variations from this system.
It is most common among groups that reckon descent through either the father (patrilineality) or the mother (matrilineality) alone.
Using figures based on those aged 10 and up, he reckons the most common age of a Radio 1 listener is 18.
The first instinct of India's prime minister, Manmohan Singh, was to call for calm and restraint, rather than to point an accusatory finger at Pakistan for sheltering the jihadi groups who, by common reckoning, are the most likely people to have perpetrated the outrage.
But what do you reckon are the most common questions posed by their anonymous audience members?
The only porpoise native to the UK, the harbour porpoise, is reckoned to be the most common cetacean (large sea-dwelling mammal) in British waters - as well as the smallest.
Gartner reckons that by next year, smartphones will overtake PCs as the most common device for accessing the web, at about 1.82bn v 1.78bn.
Besides these descendants, also terminally differentiated cells that are considered most common and widespread throughout the body, namely interstitial stromal cells and fibroblasts are reckoned direct offspring of MSC, albeit this assumption still lacks good experimental proofs.
This gene-paucity, they reckon, is why chromosome 21 is associated with Down's syndrome, the most common form of genetically mediated mental retardation.
It's reckoned that one in eight Americans aged 65 and over has Alzheimer's - the most common cause of dementia.
