Ancestor

An ancestor is a or  the parent of an ancestor (i.e., a, , and so on).

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

Assuming that all ancestors are unrelated, an individual has 2n ancestors in the nth generation before him and about 2g+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  or, more accurately, ancestor veneration.