Meaning of Ancestors

Meaning of Ancestors

The French word ancestre came to Castilian as ancestor. However, in this sense, we cannot ignore the fact that this Gallic word is considered to come, in turn, from a Latin formation such as “ancestor”.

The concept refers to an ancestor, ancestor or predecessor. For example: “My girlfriend has Hungarian ancestors”, “You should respect the culture of your ancestors”, “The young man was embarrassed to discover that he has a Nazi ancestor”.

An individual’s ancestors are his or her upline relatives: the great-great-grandparents, great-grandparents, grandparents, and parents of an individual are therefore their ancestors. The notion is usually used with reference to the most distant ancestors, which the subject did not know.

Sometimes the idea is associated with a group of individuals who, in some way, are linked to the person. The ancestors, in this framework, can be a people, a clan, an ethnic group or a tribe.

It must be established that in many families, in order to be able to know their origin and history in depth, it is common to resort to the creation of so-called family trees. These are documents where by means of a clear diagram one comes to determine the oldest relatives that are known and, from these, their marriages, their children, their brothers, their nephews and those others the same.

In the same way, in order to have knowledge of the ancestors and even of their power or the position they occupied, the so-called heraldic shields also play an essential role.

Throughout history, it was common for ancestors to be revered and valued by new generations. In fact, in various cultures there is an ancestor cult based on the belief that deceased relatives subsist in a new dimension and can exert influence in the underworld.

In today’s world, however, positive values ​​are often attributed to youth and modernity. In this way, ancestors lose importance in cultural and social consideration.

If we focus on the field of biology, two specimens are said to maintain a genetic link when they have a common ancestor or if one of these individuals is the ancestor of the second.

It is curious to know that, although research continues on what is the origin of humanity, the truth is that among the latest studies carried out, it has been established that possibly the ancestor of all living things was a bacterium that had less of 600 genes. This has been announced by a group of molecular evolutionists who belong to the National Institutes of Health (NIH) of Bethesda (United States).

That bacterium, as they have exposed, is called LUCA. They have stated that he had an autonomous life and that he had 572 genes, although his descendants later increased these genes.

Ancestors

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