For example, a boy may inherit a small jaw from one ancestor and large teeth from another.

It has been speculated that his ancestor Iddo was the head of a priestly family who returned with Zerubbabel (), and that Zechariah may himself have been a priest as well as a prophet.

In the 1740s, Pierre-Louis Moreau de Maupertuis made the first known suggestion in a series of essays that all organisms may have had a common ancestor, and that they had diverged through random variation and natural selection.

The gorilla and chimpanzee diverged around the same time, and either Sahelanthropus or Orrorin may be our last shared ancestor with them.

The knuckle walkers, the gorilla and chimpanzee, diverged around the same time, and either Sahelanthropus or Orrorin may be our last shared ancestor.

Species close to the last common ancestor of gorillas, chimpanzees and humans may be represented by Nakalipithecus fossils found in Kenya and Ouranopithecus found in Greece.

Reconstruction of Homo heidelbergensis which may be the direct ancestor of both Homo neanderthalensis and Homo sapiens.

A native Germanic ancestor of fiddle may even be the ancestor of the early Romance form of violin.

Its ancestor may have migrated from eastern to northern Africa and then to its current range with the development of the Sahara desert.

In 2007, new findings suggested that H. habilis and H. erectus coexisted and may be separate lineages from a common ancestor instead of H. erectus being descended from H. habilis.

Direct descendants may also kowtow at the funeral of an ancestor, while others would simply bow.

The Aquitanian language, spoken in Roman times, may have been an ancestor of Basque but it could also have been a sister language to its ancestor.

It is more like the evolution of microbes, with extensive lateral gene transfer: Quite distantly related languages may affect each other through language contact, which in extreme cases may lead to languages with no single ancestor, whether they be creoles or mixed languages.

In this they may be preserving its original meaning: the ultimate ancestor, here evoked by two continuous lines joining its twelve primary joints.

Originally shamanistic practices that have over time may once have been monotheistic later once since deification of an Earth Mother to the Sky father as a Duality, also including ancestor worship and an addition for a " sun deity ", polytheizing the religion and more deities were incorporated after-wards.

Depending on how far two species have diverged since their most recent common ancestor, it may still be possible for them to produce offspring, as with horses and donkeys mating to produce mules.

Among tribes, qualification may be based upon a required percentage of Native American " blood " ( or the " blood quantum ") of an individual seeking recognition, or documented descent from an ancestor on the Dawes Rolls or other registers.

Several cyanobacterial strains are also capable of diazotrophic growth, an ability which may have been present in their last common ancestor in the Archaean.

Laura may have been Laura de Noves, the wife of Count Hugues de Sade ( an ancestor of the Marquis de Sade ).

They may be seen as the ancestor of such military weapons as the lance, the pilum, the halberd, the naginata, the glaive, the bill, and the pike.

They may have originated in the last universal common ancestor, or arisen independently multiple times, or perhaps arisen once and then spread to other kingdoms by horizontal gene transfer.

Indian ghosts would not impinge upon his nights, nor would his days be haunted by the dimly-outlined, ill-conceived figure of her benighted ancestor.

The earliest known alphabet in the wider sense is the Wadi el-Hol script, believed to be an abjad, which through its successor Phoenician is the ancestor of modern alphabets, including Arabic, Greek, Latin ( via the Old Italic alphabet ), Cyrillic ( via the Greek alphabet ) and Hebrew ( via Aramaic ).

Although only one of his four children survived to adulthood, Antoninus came to be ancestor to generations of prominent Roman statesmen and socialites, including at least one empress consort.

" Ever since the time of my ancestor Ali, the first Imam, that is to say over a period of thirteen hundred years, it has always been the tradition of our family that each Imam chooses his successor at his absolute and unfettered discretion from amongst any of his descendants, whether they be sons or remote male issue and in these circumstances and in view of the fundamentally altered conditions in the world in very recent years due to the great changes which have taken place including the discoveries of atomic science, I am convinced that it is in the best interest of the Shia Muslim Ismailia Community that I should be succeeded by a young man who has been brought up and developed during recent years and in the midst of the new age and who brings a new outlook on life to his office as Imam.

According to biblical scholars, the Torah's genealogy for Levi's descendants, is actually an aetiological myth reflecting the fact that there were four different groups among the levites – the Gershonites, Kohathites, Merarites, and Aaronids ; Aaron – the eponymous ancestor of the Aaronids – couldn't be portrayed as a brother to Gershon, Kohath, and Merari, as the narrative about the birth of Moses ( brother of Aaron ), which textual scholars attribute to the earlier Elohist source, mentions only that both his parents were Levites ( without identifying their names ).

All dinosaurs are believed to be descended from a fully bipedal ancestor, perhaps similar to Eoraptor.

The Celtic tribe of central Europe must in that case be a final daughter population of a linguistically diversifying ancestor tribe.

Thus, if two species use the same codon at the same place to specify an amino acid that can be represented by more than one codon, that is evidence for a recent common ancestor.

" Attributes that are seen as religious — such as ancestor worship, ritual, and sacrifice — were advocated by Confucius as necessary for social harmony ; however, these attributes can be traced to the traditional non-Confucian Chinese beliefs of Chinese folk religion, and are also practiced by Daoists and Chinese Buddhists.

A clade is by definition monophyletic, meaning it contains one ancestor ( which can be an organism, a population, or a species ) and all its descendants.

The ancestor can be known or unknown ; any and all members of a clade can be extant or extinct.

In his fictional historical essay " The Hyborian Age ", Howard describes how the people of Atlantis — the land where his character King Kull originated — had to move east after a great cataclysm changed the face of the world and sank their island, settling where Ireland and Scotland would eventually be located, Thus they are ( in Howard's work ) the ancestors of the Irish and Scottish ( the Celtic Gaels ) and not the Picts, the other ancestor of modern Scots who also appear in Howard's work.

Relation is deemed certain only if at least a partial reconstruction of the common ancestor is feasible, and if regular sound correspondences can be established with chance similarities ruled out.

From the time of year ( close to the autumnal equinox ) and the elves ' association with fertility and the ancestors, it might be assumed that it had to do with the ancestor cult and the life force of the family.

Each of these have been argued to be a bipedal ancestor of later hominins, but in each cases the claims have been contested.

Pseudaelurus is believed to be the latest common ancestor of the two extant subfamilies and the extinct subfamily, Machairodontinae.

Clearly, then, any two Englishmen must have at least this one ancestor in common, and thus any individual could claim kinship with the king.

Well-known spiritual systems include animism ( the notion of inanimate objects having spirits ), spiritualism ( an appeal to gods or communion with ancestor spirits ); shamanism ( the vesting of an individual with mystic powers ); and divination ( magically obtaining the truth ).

Regarding the origin of the individual protein components, an interesting paper on the evolution of dyneins shows that the more complex protein family of ciliary dynein has an apparent ancestor in a simpler cytoplasmic dynein ( which itself has evolved from the AAA protein family that occurs widely in all archea, bacteria and eukaryotes ).

The nuclear family is ego-centered and impermanent, while descent groups are permanent ( lasting beyond the lifespans of individual constituents ) and reckoned according to a single ancestor.

Because this society has characteristics of both its capitalist ancestor and is beginning to show the properties of communism, it will hold the means of production collectively but distributes commodities according to individual contribution.

Each of the Oïl languages has developed in its own way from the common ancestor, and division of the development into periods varies according to the individual histories.

Each such line connects the two individuals via a common ancestor, passing through no individual which is not a common ancestor more than once.

In genetics, the most recent common ancestor ( MRCA ) of any set of organisms is the most recent individual from which all organisms in the group are directly descended.

Flavius Josephus states the traditional belief that this individual was the ancestor of the Greek people.

In genetic genealogy, the identical ancestors point ( IAP ) is that point in a given population's past where each individual then alive turned out to be either the ancestor of every individual alive now, or to have no living descendants at all.