News tagged with ancestor
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 |
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Change in developmental timing was crucial in the evolutionary shift from dinosaurs to birds: study
At first glance, it's hard to see how a common house sparrow and a Tyrannosaurus Rex might have anything in common. After all, one is a bird that weighs less than an ounce, and the other is a dinosaur that ...
Other Sciences / Archaeology & Fossils
May 27, 2012 |
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Today's environment influences behavior generations later: research
Researchers at The University of Texas at Austin and Washington State University have seen an increased reaction to stress in animals whose ancestors were exposed to an environmental compound generations earlier. The findings, ...
May 21, 2012 |
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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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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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'Lucy' lived among close cousins: Discovery of foot fossil confirms two human ancestor species co-existed
(PhysOrg.com) -- A new fossil discovery from Eastern Africa called the Burtele foot indicates Australopithecus afarensis, an early relative of modern humans, may not have been the only hominin to walk the pl ...
Other Sciences / Archaeology & Fossils
Mar 28, 2012 |
4.3 / 5 (11) |
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Plants may have a single ancestor
(PhysOrg.com) -- An international group of scientists has analyzed the DNA of primitive microscopic algae, and their findings suggest that all plants on Earth may have had a single ancestor.
Feb 17, 2012 |
4.9 / 5 (16) |
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New study of hunter-gatherers suggests social networks sparked evolution of cooperation
Ancient humans may not have had the luxury of updating their Facebook status, but social networks were nevertheless an essential component of their lives, a new study suggests.
Other Sciences / Social Sciences
Jan 25, 2012 |
4 / 5 (3) |
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'Animal embryo' fossils are actually microbes (Update)
Tiny fossils that scientists have thought for decades were the embryos of the earliest animals ever found have turned out to be the remains of much simpler microbial organisms.
Other Sciences / Archaeology & Fossils
Dec 22, 2011 |
4.6 / 5 (11) |
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Shrimp-like crustacean found to make gooey underwater silk
(PhysOrg.com) -- Fritz Vollrath and colleagues from Oxford University have been analyzing the gooey material produced by tiny amphipods known as Crassicorophium bonellii, a small shrimp-like creature that p ...
Nov 23, 2011 |
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Last universal common ancestor more complex than previously thought
Scientists call it LUCA, the Last Universal Common Ancestor, but they don't know much about this great-grandparent of all living things. Many believe LUCA was little more than a crude assemblage of molecular parts, a chemical ...
Oct 05, 2011 |
4.9 / 5 (11) |
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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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Discovery of a 160-million-year-old fossil represents a new milestone in early mammal evolution
(PhysOrg.com) -- A remarkably well-preserved fossil discovered in northeast China provides new information about the earliest ancestors of most of today's mammal species—the placental mammals. According ...
Other Sciences / Archaeology & Fossils
Aug 24, 2011 |
4.5 / 5 (17) |
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Biological anthropologists question claims for human ancestry
"Too simple" and "not so fast" suggest biological anthropologists from the George Washington University and New York University about the origins of human ancestry. In the upcoming issue of the journal Nature, the anthro ...
Other Sciences / Archaeology & Fossils
Feb 16, 2011 |
4.9 / 5 (17) |
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On their own 2 feet: 3.2 million-year-old fossil foot bone supports humanlike bipedalism in Lucy's species
A fossilized foot bone recovered from Hadar, Ethiopia, shows that by 3.2 million years ago human ancestors walked bipedally with a modern human-like foot, a report that appears Feb. 11 in the journal Science, conclu ...
Other Sciences / Archaeology & Fossils
Feb 10, 2011 |
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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.
