News tagged with ancestor
Intelligent people have 'unnatural' preferences and values that are novel in human evolution
More intelligent people are significantly more likely to exhibit social values and religious and political preferences that are novel to the human species in evolutionary history. Specifically, liberalism and atheism, and ...
Other Sciences / Social Sciences
Feb 24, 2010 |
3.6 / 5 (168) |
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Neanderthals may have interbred with humans twice
(PhysOrg.com) -- Extinct human species such as Neanderthals may still be with us, at least in our DNA, and this may help explain why they disappeared from the fossil record around 30,000 years ago.
Other Sciences / Archaeology & Fossils
Apr 21, 2010 |
4.8 / 5 (48) |
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Human ancestors used fire one million years ago, archaeologist find
An international team led by the University of Toronto and Hebrew University has identified the earliest known evidence of the use of fire by human ancestors. Microscopic traces of wood ash, alongside animal ...
Other Sciences / Archaeology & Fossils
Apr 02, 2012 |
4.8 / 5 (43) |
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Before 'Lucy,' there was 'Ardi': Oldest hominid skeleton provides new evidence for human evolution (w/ Video)
In a special issue of Science, an international team of scientists has for the first time thoroughly described Ardipithecus ramidus, a hominid species that lived 4.4 million years ago in what is now Ethiop ...
Other Sciences / Archaeology & Fossils
Oct 01, 2009 |
4.6 / 5 (36) |
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Skulls show New World was settled twice: study
Two distinct groups from Asia settled in the New World and not one single migration as suggested by previous genetic studies, experts said Monday after comparing the skulls of early Americans.
Other Sciences / Archaeology & Fossils
Jun 14, 2010 |
4.7 / 5 (32) |
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Genetic research confirms that non-Africans are part Neanderthal
Some of the human X chromosome originates from Neanderthals and is found exclusively in people outside Africa, according to an international team of researchers led by Damian Labuda of the Department of Pediatrics at the ...
Other Sciences / Archaeology & Fossils
Jul 18, 2011 |
5 / 5 (28) |
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'Game-changer' in evolution from S. African bones
An analysis of 2 million-year-old bones found in South Africa offers the most powerful case so far in identifying the transitional figure that came before modern humans - findings some are calling a potential ...
Other Sciences / Archaeology & Fossils
Sep 08, 2011 |
4.8 / 5 (25) |
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New hypothesis for human evolution and human nature
It's no secret to any dog-lover or cat-lover that humans have a special connection with animals. But in a new journal article and forthcoming book, paleoanthropologist Pat Shipman of Penn State University ...
Jul 20, 2010 |
4.4 / 5 (27) |
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Ancient teeth raise new questions about the origins of modern man
Eight small teeth found in a cave near Rosh Haain, central Israel, are raising big questions about the earliest existence of humans and where we may have originated, says Binghamton University anthropologist ...
Other Sciences / Archaeology & Fossils
Feb 09, 2011 |
4.6 / 5 (25) |
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New species of early hominid found
(PhysOrg.com) -- A previously unknown species of hominid that lived in what is now South Africa around two million years ago has been found in the form of a fossilized skeleton of a child and several bones ...
Other Sciences / Archaeology & Fossils
Apr 06, 2010 |
4.7 / 5 (23) |
10
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Chickens 'one-up' humans in ability to see color
(PhysOrg.com) -- Researchers at Washington University School of Medicine in St. Louis have peered deep into the eye of the chicken and found a masterpiece of biological design.
Feb 16, 2010 |
4.7 / 5 (22) |
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Dingoes, like wolves, are smarter than pet dogs
(PhysOrg.com) -- Studies in the past have shown that wolves are smarter than domesticated dogs when it comes to solving spatial problems, and now new research has shown that dingoes also solve the problems ...
Jun 11, 2010 |
4.6 / 5 (22) |
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Researchers Probe Links Between Modern Humans and Neanderthals
Which genes make us uniquely human? Scientists are looking at DNA in old bones to find out. The focus now is not so much on our own species, Homo sapiens. Instead, scientists are probing DNA in well-preserved pieces ...
Sep 19, 2009 |
4.7 / 5 (21) |
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New ancestor? Scientists ponder DNA from Siberia
(PhysOrg.com) -- An international team of scientists from the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology in Leipzig has sequenced ancient mitochondrial DNA from a finger bone found in southern Siberia. ...
Other Sciences / Archaeology & Fossils
Mar 24, 2010 |
4.6 / 5 (21) |
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Great Unconformity: Evidence for a geologic trigger of the Cambrian explosion
(Phys.org) -- The oceans teemed with life 600 million years ago, but the simple, soft-bodied creatures would have been hardly recognizable as the ancestors of nearly all animals on Earth today.
Space & Earth / Earth Sciences
Apr 18, 2012 |
4.8 / 5 (19) |
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Ancestor
An ancestor is a parent or (recursively) the parent of an ancestor (i.e., a grandparent, great-grandparent, 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 which 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 of an individual's ancestors are otherwise unrelated to each other, that individual has 2n ancestors in the nth generation before him and a total of about 2g+1 ancestors in the g generations before him. In practice, however, it is clear that the vast majority of ancestors of humans (and indeed any other species) are multiply related (see Pedigree collapse). Consider n = 40: the human species is surely more than 40 generations old, yet the number 240, approximately 1012 or one trillion, dwarfs the number of humans that have ever lived.
Ignoring the possibility of other inter-relationships (even distant ones) among ancestors, an individual has a total of 2046 ancestors up to the 10th generation, 1024 of which are 10th generation ancestors. With the same assumption, any given person has over a billion 30th generation ancestors (who lived roughly 1000 years ago) and this theoretical number increases past the estimated total population of the world in around AD 1000. (All of these ancestors will have contributed to one's autosomal DNA is concerned: this excludes Y-chromosomal DNA and mitochondrial DNA.)
Some cultures confer reverence to ancestors, both living and dead; in contrast, some more youth-oriented cultural contexts display less veneration of 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.
For more information about Ancestor, read the full article at
Wikipedia.
This text uses material from Wikipedia and is available under the GNU Free Documentation License.
