Ancestor

An ancestor is a parent or (recursively) the parent of an ancestor (i.e., a grandparent, great-grandparent, great-great-grandparent, great-great-great-grandparent, great-great-great-great-grandparent, and so forth).

Two individuals have a genetic relationship if one is the ancestor of the other, or if they share a common ancestor. In evolutionary theory, species who share an evolutionary ancestor are said to be of common descent. However, this concept of ancestry does not apply to some bacteria and other organisms capable of horizontal gene transfer.

Assuming that all ancestors are unrelated, an individual has 2ⁿ ancestors in the nth generation before him and about 2^g+1 total ancestors in the g generations before him. In practise, however, it's clear that the vast majority of ancestors of humans (and indeed any other species) are somehow related. Consider n = 40: the human species is surely more than 40 generations old, yet the number 2⁴⁰ dwarfs the number of humans that have ever lived.

Some cultures place great reverence on ancestors, both living and dead; contrastingly, people in more youth-oriented cultural contexts may display a lesser degree of veneration for elders. In other cultural contexts, some people seek providence from their deceased ancestors; this practice is sometimes known as ancestor worship or, more accurately, ancestor veneration.

As far as contribution to ones autosomal DNA is concerned ( this does not include Y-chromosomal DNA or mitochondrial DNA) and assuming that none of one's ancestors had children with relatives (even distant relatives), an individual has 1296 ancestors going back 36 generations.Still assuming that none of one's ancestors had children with relatives, one's 37th generation ancestors do not contribute to one's autosomal DNA ( an individual has .000000001 % of the same DNA as a 36th generation ancestor).

See also

• Ancestry (United States)
• Genealogy
• Ancestor worship
• Cousin
• Descendant
• Family
• Family relationship
• Most recent common ancestor
• Kinship and descent
• Ethnicity
• Legendary progenitor

License

This article is licensed under the GNU Free Documentation License. It uses material from the Wikipedia article "Ancestor".