We observe closely related species in sympatry and infer how they evolved from a common ancestor.
The ancestor of every action is a thought.
Touch is incredibly important as part of the human experience. Our ancestors relied on human touch to form and strengthen bonds with each other. Touch can accelerate a feeling of connection and releases hormones in our body that engender trust and build connection.
Our ancestors are totally essential to our every waking moment, although most of us don’t even have the faintest idea about their lives, their trials, their hardships or challenges.
I think, in many people’s minds, the Confederate battle flag is not only a memorial to our ancestors, which is perfectly OK, but also a symbol of white superiority and an inclination for people to believe that even slavery would’ve been OK.
My first name – I have no middle name – was chosen by my father, as he told me, on that solitary walk in the forested hills. He selected it from a verse of the seventh chapter of Isaiah; there was no Immanuel among our ancestors known to him.
My ancestors were fighters, something I have inherited.
Maybe my caveman ancestors invented the wheel or something. I’m not sure.
We have a system that is deeply narcissistic – the consumer sort of capitalist culture. It’s all about me and now and what do I need that just makes you feel a bit better with all the stress. But in other healthy cultures, they have a real sense of ancestor and a sense of the next seven generations.
All of us in the Ball family in South Carolina, from the time we’re children, hear stories about our ancestors, the slave owners.
If you share a common ancestor with somebody, you’re related to them. It doesn’t mean that you’re going to invite them to the family reunion, but it means that you share DNA.
Even city people have ancestors who had their hands in the dirt.
I haven’t checked, but I highly suspect that chickens evolved from an egg-laying ancestor, which would mean that there were, in fact, eggs before there were chickens. Genius.
We forget that the soul has its own ancestors.
The people made worse off by slavery were those who were enslaved. Their descendants would have been worse off today if born in Africa instead of America. Put differently, the terrible fate of their ancestors benefitted them.
My mother’s Maori, and my father’s Australian. I take my strength from both my ancestors, and I’m really privileged.
I envy those Hindus and Buddhists who have in their religion philosophy and ancestor worship which build in the believer a continuity with the past, and that most important ingredient in the building of a nation – memory.
I was being groomed as an undergraduate to specialize in Midwestern prehistory, but going back to my teenage days, my interest has always been in our early human ancestors. I wanted to work in Africa.
Though as a psychologist I like to think that nothing human is foreign to me, I admit to having been repeatedly flabbergasted by the insouciance, and sometimes relish, with which our ancestors carried out and witnessed unspeakable cruelties.
Good food for free has been the holy grail of foragers since our ancestors first climbed down from the trees.
And, you know, the fact is, if you believe in evolution, we all have a common ancestor, and we all have a common ancestry with the plant in the lobby. This is what evolution tells us. And, it’s true. It’s kind of unbelievable.
I can see why many Southerners, black ones in particular, don’t like the implication that Southernness and the Confederate heritage are one and the same, because they’re not. On the other hand, there are people who want to extirpate that completely and want folks to spit on the graves of their ancestors.
If people want to believe that our ancestors were riding around on dinosaurs or that the protracted, increasing, and devastating warming of the Earth is just nature doing its thing – I guess I feel I have more useful battles to fight.
Ancestor worship, or filial piety so characteristic of Asian cultures, for example, does not really resonate with Americans who favor children, not grandparents.
Building the future holds more attraction than ancestor worship, whichever ancestor we’re talking about.
My ancestors are Highland Scots, and my father’s home in north Alabama is so much like northwest Arkansas. I have the same allergies in both places.
When our systematic knowledge of human expressive behavior is more advanced, it will be possible to study the literary and historical documents of the past and to determine the expressed and implied views of personality that determined the behavior of our ancestors.
Very long ago our ancestors had moral systems. Our current institutions are only a couple of thousand years old, which is really not old in the eyes of a biologist.
It’s part of my DNA as a Portuguese. Like many of my ancestors, there’s that need to discover the world – exploration is in my blood.
November is Native American Heritage month, and a good time to honor the legacy of our ancestors, but every day we should stop to think about our country’s beginning and that the United States would not exist if not for a great deal of sacrifice, blood, and tears by Indian Tribes across the country.
Every man is a quotation from all his ancestors.
When I was a child, my parents took my brothers and me to Port-au-Prince during the summer so we could get to know the country of our ancestors. Because Haiti is an island, the beach is everywhere. Haitians are particular, even snobby, about beaches.
In China there is a holiday around the death of your ancestors where everyone goes to the cemetery. It’s a celebratory thing. It’s very colorful.
To me it seems that the warm blooded dinosaurs replaced advanced mammal ancestors that were warm blooded, also.
Let us make future generations remember us as proud ancestors just as, today, we remember our forefathers.
With this realization, came a growing need for men and women willing to take up arms in an effort to protect our American way of life and the freedoms so many of our ancestors died to entrench.
Somebody would think I was trying to get favored treatment because my ancestors had the name Moon. And that’s a joke.
I’m a mixture of Anglo-Saxon, a bit of Spanish and one-eighth American. I’ve often wondered if I have an Asiatic ancestor from the East as well because I have deep-set eyes. Make-up artists are constantly trying to shade my eyelids, and I have to point out that I don’t have any!
It is fortunate that each generation does not comprehend its own ignorance. We are thus enabled to call our ancestors barbarous.
I don’t know much about my family history except that my father had straight black hair and his ancestors probably came from India.
Chinese culture in general is not very religious. Confucianism is more a code of ethics than a religion, and ancestor worship is a way for parents to control you even after they’re dead.
Gentility is what is left over from rich ancestors after the money is gone.
I’ve learned that for Indian people, the opportunity for us to succeed is very slim. So acting was a great tool for that. And in the process of learning about my culture, I’ve learned how to connect myself again to my ancestors.
Our African ancestors were the first to engage in breathing. By that logic, I think by breathing today, we are engaging in cultural appropriation of the first Homo sapiens. And so the only way I will ask you to stop being racist is to suffocate – to stop breathing.
There’s a rich legend of this in other cultures, this speaking with ancestors. The Christian mystics communicated with angels.
Mushrooms are miniature pharmaceutical factories, and of the thousands of mushroom species in nature, our ancestors and modern scientists have identified several dozen that have a unique combination of talents that improve our health.
A fossil is so powerful. It’s moving. This is my ancestor. The naturalist is moved by the fossil… not the cross.
I love my people’s history. I feel a huge responsibility to tell the stories of my past and my ancestors’ past.
To be at the forefront of something that can spark a major change as far as kids going to an HBCU and learning about our history and learning about our culture and learning about our ancestors, where we came from – that’s a big thing, that’s a really big thing.
Writing is conscience, scruple, and the farming of our ancestors.
Christianity doesn’t demand that we worship our ancestors. If we don’t remember our ancestors, then, in all likelihood, we cannot also recall the distant past.
Each has his own tree of ancestors, but at the top of all sits Probably Arboreal.
We should not look down on our first ancestors.
We must create the Georgia that our ancestors dreamed of, the Georgia that we dream of.
Learning from the experiences of our ancestors, let us together create knowledge for all that benefits all.
I have a deep tribal sense. I grew up in a synagogue that my ancestors built. I sat in the third row. My family was decent. They were good people; they were handshake people. So I never had a sense of rebellion.
It is possible that strong levels of belief in God, gods, spirits or the supernatural might have given our ancestors considerable comforts and advantages.
