Ancestor
An
ancestor or
forebear is a parent or the parent of an ancestor.
Ancestor is "any person from whom one is descended. In law the person from whom an estate has been inherited." 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 2
n ancestors in the
nth generation before him and a total of about 2
g+1 ancestors in the
g generations before him. In practice, however, it is clear that the vast majority of ancestors of humans are multiply related. Consider
n = 40: the human species is more than 40 generations old, yet the number 240, approximately 1012 or one trillion, dwarfs the number of humans that have ever lived.