An ancestor is a person, animal, or organism from whom another person, animal, or organism is descended. Here are some key points about ancestors:
- Ancestors can be parents or (recursively) the parents of antecedents, such as grandparents, great-grandparents, and so on.
- In law, an ancestor is the person from whom an estate has been inherited.
- In genetics, 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 that share an evolutionary ancestor are said to be of common descent.
- Some bacteria and other organisms capable of horizontal gene transfer do not have a concept of ancestry.
- Ancestors can be living or dead, and some cultures confer reverence to both.
- The average person may have twice as many female ancestors as male ancestors.
- The human species is more than 40 generations old, yet the number of ancestors, approximately 1 trillion, dwarfs the number of humans who have ever lived.
In biology, an ancestor can also refer to the actual or hypothetical form or stock from which an organism has developed or descended. For example, the ancient animal that was the ancestor of the modern horse. In linguistics, an ancestor can refer to a language from which other languages have derived. For instance, Latin is the ancestor of Italian and French.
