, his mother, his maternal grandmother, and his great-grandmother. Thus, the women are all ancestors of the baby.]]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
Source:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ancestry