Different Names for Grandparents

Grandparents are the father or mother of a person's own father or mother. Everyone has a maximum of four genetic grandparents, eight genetic great-grandparents, sixteen genetic great-great-grandparents, etc. Sometimes these numbers are lower and in the case of having only two or three grandparents sibling or half-sibling incest would be incorporated.

In cases where the parents are unwilling or unable to provide adequate care for their children, in cases of death or other, grandparents often take on the role of primary caregivers. Even when this is not the case, grandparents often participate in the raising of children.

In traditional cultures, grandparents often had a direct and clear role in relation to the care and nurture of children.

One can also be a step-grandparent. A step-grandparent can be your parent's stepparent or your stepparent's parent. A stepparent's stepparent is called a step-step-grandparent, etc.

The various words for grandparents at times may also be used to refer to any elderly person, especially the terms gramps, granny, grandfather, grandmother and even more types that most families make up themselves.

Two individuals who have grandparents in common, but are not siblings, are called first cousins. The parents of a person's first cousins are his or her uncles and aunts.

Family denotes a group of people or animals (many species form the equivalent of a human family wherein the adults care for the young) affiliated by a consanguinity, affinity or co-residence. Although the concept of consanguinity originally referred to relations by "blood," anthropologists have argued that one must understand the idea of "blood" metaphorically, and that many societies understand 'family' through other concepts rather than through genetic distance.

One of the primary functions of the family is to produce and reproduce persons, biologically and socially.Schneider, David 1984 A Critique of the Study of Kinship. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press. p. 182Deleuze-Guattari (1972). Part 2, ch. 3, p.80 Thus, one's experience of one's family shifts over time. From the perspective of children, the family is a family of orientation: the family serves to locate children socially, and plays a major role in their enculturation and socialization.Russon, John, (2003) Human Expe...

Category: File - :Mehmooni2.jpg|thumb|The Persian Hasht-Behesht Palace

Category: File - :Ägyptischer Maler um 1400 v. Chr. 001.jpg|thumb|Ancient Egyptian art

Category: File - :Gobustan ancient Azerbaycan full.jpg|thumb|Petroglyphs, Gobustan, Azerbaijan

Culture (from the Latin cultura stemming from colere, meaning "to cultivate")Harper, Douglas (2001). Online Etymology Dictionary is a term that has different meanings. For example, in 1952, Alfred Kroeber and Clyde Kluckhohn compiled a list of 164 definitions of "culture" in Culture: A Critical Review of Concepts and Definitions.Kroeber, A. L. and C. Kluckhohn, 1952. Culture: A Critical Review of Concepts and Definitions. However, the word "culture" is most commonly used in three basic senses:

* excellence of taste in the fine arts and humanities, also known as high culture

* an integrated pattern of human knowledge, belief, and behavior that depends upon the capacity for symbolic thought and social learning

* the set of shared attitudes, values, goals, and practices that characterizes an institution, organization or group.

When the concept first emerged in eighteenth- and nineteenth-century Europe, it connoted a process of cultivation or improvement, as in agriculture or horticulture. In the nineteenth century, it came to refer first to the betterment or refinement of the individual, especially through education, and then to the fulfillment of national aspirations or ideals. In the mid-nineteenth century, some scientists used the term "culture" to refer to a universal human capacity.

In the twentieth century, "culture" emerged as a concept central to anthropology, encompassing all human phenomena that are not purely results of human genetics. Specifically, the term "culture" in American anthropology had two meanings: (1) the evolved human capacity to classify and represent experiences with symbols, and to act imaginatively and creatively; and (2) the distinct ways that people living in different parts of the world classified and represented their experiences, and acted creatively. Following World War II, the term became important, albeit with different meanings, in other disciplines such as sociology, cultural studies, organizational psychology and management studies.

An ancestor is a parent or (recursively) the parent of an ancestor (i.e., a grandparent, great-grandparent, great-great-grandparent, and so forth).

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 who 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 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 (see Pedigree collapse). 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.

As far as contribution to one's autosomal DNA is concerned (this does not include Y-chromosomal DNA or mitochondrial DNA) assuming that none of one's ancestors had children with relatives (even distant relatives), an individual has a total of 2046 ancestors up to the 10th generation, 1024 of which are 10th-generation ancestors. With the same assumption, any given person has over a million 20th-generation ancestors (generally equivalent to around 500 years) and this theoretical number increases past the total population of the world at around 1400 AD.

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 ancestor worship or, more accurately, ancestor veneration.