Ancestor

Ancestor (pronounced an-ses-ter or an-suh-ster)

(1) A person from whom one is descended (maternal or paternal); forebear; progenitor (often used in the plural and by convention, applied usually to (1) great grand-parents or earlier or (2) those already deceased).

(2) In biology, the actual or hypothetical form or stock from which a (usually dissimilar) organism has developed or descended.

(3) An object, idea, style, or occurrence serving as a prototype, forerunner, or inspiration to a later one; in linguistics, a word or phrase which serves as the origin of a term in another language.

(4) A person who serves as an influence or model for another; one from whom mental, artistic, spiritual, etc., descent is claimed.

(5) In the law of probate, person from whom an heir derives an inheritance; one from whom an estate has descended (the correlative of heir).

(6) In figurative use, one who had the same role or function in former times (now rare except as a literary device).

1250–1300: From the Middle English ancestre, auncestre & ancessour (one from whom a person is descended).  Ancestre & auncestre were from the (early) Old French ancesre & (the later) ancestre (which endures in modern French as ancêtre), from the Latin nominative antecēssor (one who goes before (literally “fore-goer”), from the Classical Latin antecēdere (to procede), the construct being ante (before), from the primitive Indo-European root ant- (front, forehead (and influenced by the derivatives meaning "in front of, before")) + cedere (to go), from the primitive Indo-European root ked- (to go, yield).  Ancessour was from the Old French ancessor, from the Latin accusative antecessorem, from antecedo (to go before), the construct being ante (before) + cedo (to go).  Both rare outside of technical literature, the present participle is ancestoring and the past participle ancestored.  Synonyms include forebear, forefather, founder, antecedent, ascendant, foremother, forerunner, precursor, primogenitor, progenitor, antecessor & foregoer.

The now rare (and probably extinct) antecessor (a doublet of ancestor) dates from circa 1300 in the sense of "an ancestor" and a century later as the more generalized "a predecessor".  The noun ancestry (series or line of ancestors, descent from ancestors) was from the early fourteenth century auncestrie, from the Old French ancesserie (ancestry, ancestors, forefathers) from ancestre, the spelling modified in English under the influence of ancestor.  The adjective ancestral (pertaining to ancestors) dates from the 1520s, from Old French ancestrel (the spelling in Anglo-French auncestrel) (ancestral) from ancestre.  The alternative form ancestorial co-existed for decades after the 1650s but presumably can still be used for linguistic variety although it’s probably obsolete and may thus be thought an affectation.  The adverb ancestrally followed the adjective.

The familiar spelling in Modern English was in circulation by the early fifteenth century and the alternative spellings ancestour, antecessour, auncestor & auncestour (etymologists nothing even more as errors in medieval transcription rather than linguistic forks) are all long obsolete.  The noun plural is ancestors and the always rare feminine form ancestress, dating from the 1570s, is probably extinct except in historic reference.  In the biological sciences and the study of human genealogy, the derived terms include cenancestor (the last ancestor common of two or more lineages, especially the universal last common ancestor (LCA) of all life and grandcestor (not precisely defined but used to refer to more distant ancestors, especially (collectively) those for whom no identifiable records exist.  One interesting modern creation is trancestor (a forebear or forerunner to a trans person, or to modern transgender people in general).

Conventions of use

Depending on context, the word ancestor can be used (1) to refer to those who constitute one’s direct lineage (father, grandmother, great grandfather etc), (2) one’s ethnic heritage (English, German, Persian etc), or (3) the line of ancient evolutionary descent ((hominoidea, hominiade etc).  Such forbears (usually synonymous with ancestor but can be used more generally (eg political forebares), even without an (often implied) modifier) are also in some sense one’s predecessors (from the Middle English predecessour, from the Old French predecesseor (forebear), from the Late Latin praedēcessor, the construct being prae- (pre-) (before; prior to) + dēcessor (retiring officer), Latin dēcēdō (I retire, I die (source of the English decease)) but that word tends to be used where the human relationships are not familial or with objects.  One’s ancestors are thus (1) exactly known (back as many generations as records exist which, depending on the family, may be recent or stretch back centuries), (2) hypothesized (earlier generations the details of which are undocumented or of which there is no awareness), (3) a generalized expression of ethnic extraction (slavic, Polish-Scottish etc) and (4) an expression of human evolution.

Lindsay Lohan's family tree.  Genealogists traditionally use a trunk and branch metaphor because it's the best way graphically to display the procreative ways of one's ancestors.  

Ancestry is thus not something exclusively human and extends to non-human animal species, plant life and even organisms which are not alive in some senses of the word such as viruses.  So usefully understood is the concept of ancestry that that the word is used even in fields like cosmology (discussing the evolution of planets, stars etc), software (the industry’s naming conventions (1.0, 1.1, 2.0 etc) inherently ancestral), geology (noting the transformative process by which liquid magma becomes rock) and generally in fields such as philosophy, musicology, architecture, painting or any discipline where there is some discernible relationship between an idea or object and that which can be defined as a predecessor.

Nor is it unique to human ancestry that ancestors are individually identified and named to the extent possible.  In the pedigree breeding of animals (cats, dogs etc), the papers exist to trace the lineage of these beasts back further than a goodly number of the world’s population can manage, the best known example of which is are thoroughbred race horses for to qualify as one, it must be possible to trace the descent of each individual back to three Arabian stallions brought to England in the seventeenth & eighteenth centuries: Byerley Turk (1680s), Darley Arabian (1704), & Godolphin Arabian (1729).  Ancestry is also important to those other thoroughbreds, royalty and the aristocracy, for upon it depends inheritance of title, land, wealth and occasionally countries.  Vital therefore but as a guarantee of blue-blooded purity it’s long proved a challenge to maintain because of the proclivity of both species to sire bastard progeny and it could be dangerous too, wars over such matters not unknown and the odd inconvenient bastard has met an unfortunate end.

The muscle car and its ancestors

1970 Plymouth Hemi Roadrunner.

The definition of the muscle car is sometimes disputed and the term is more useful if the net is cast a little wider but the classic definition is “an American mid-sized (intermediate) two-door, four seat car produced between 1964-1972 and powered by the large engines hitherto reserved for the full-sized lines”.  That’s precise but also excludes many machines most (definitionally non-obsessive) folk include when considering the muscle car era such as the highest-performance version of the two-seat sports cars (Chevrolet Corvette, AC Shelby Cobra, AMC AMX), the full-sized machines (Ford Galaxie, Chevrolet Impala etc), the pony cars (Ford Mustang, Pontiac Firebird etc) and the compacts (Chevrolet Nova, Dodge Dart etc).

1970 Chevrolet Chevelle SS454 Convertible (LS6).

Apart from what frankly was the craziness of the muscle cars, one reason the machines of the era remain so memorable is that the 1960s represented the industry's last days of relative freedom.  The regulations imposed by government on designers went from being in the 1950s a manageable nuisance (the few rules which existed sometimes just versions of industry protection) to something annoying intrusive by the late 1960s before in the 1970s becoming truly restrictive and costly.  That most of the regulations were a very good idea and in the interest of just about everybody is not the point.

1956 Chrysler 300B.

There had in the 1950s been something of a power race as manufacturers competed to offer increasingly powerful V8s although in that era, there were no intermediate, compact or pony cars, each manufacturer offering essentially a one-size-fits-all range so the biggest, most powerful engines tended to be installed in the most luxurious and expensive of their lines.  The car with the most obvious claim to ancestry is probably the 1949 Oldsmobile 88 which used the new 303 cubic inch (5.0 litre) Rocket V8 which was modest enough compared with what would follow but was certainly a step in the muscle car direction.  Similarly, the 1955 Chrysler 300 was probably the first post-war US sedan blatantly to emphasize performance and it did offer the corporation's most powerful engine but it was still in the same body as the rest of the range.  More convincing ancestors perhaps were offerings by Chevrolet and (improbably) Rambler which offered high-power options in usually inoffensive sedans but the lift was achieved not by increased capacity but the technological advance of fuel-injection.  The tradition was thus of muscular rather than muscle cars (as subsequently defined), the latter needing the smaller platforms which would appear in the early 1960s.

1964 Pontiac GTO.

The first muscle car is usually said to be the 1964 Pontiac GTO, created by offering the 389 cubic inch (6.5 litre) V8 as an option in the intermediate Tempest, the largest engine otherwise available the (now slightly downsized) 326 (5.3 litre) cubic inch unit.  The original GTO was an option package rather than a designated model, this a contrivance to work-around an edict from General Motors (GM, Pontiac’s corporate parent) which didn’t permit the big engines to be used in the intermediate platform.  Such was success of the (highly profitable) GTO that GM rapidly withdrew the prohibition and a rash of imitators immediately emerged, both from the corporation’s other divisions and those under the umbrella of the competition, Ford and Chrysler.

1962 GAZ-21 Volga (rebuilt to M-23 (KGB (V8) specifications)).

GM in the 1960s was in many ways an innovative corporation but also, as circumstances demanded, imitative: The 1962 Chevy II (later Nova) was conceptually a copy of the 1960 Ford Falcon, the 1966 Chevrolet Camaro a response to the 1964 Ford Mustang and the 1965 Chevrolet Caprice was inspired by the debut of the Ford LTD a few months earlier.  That’s accepted orthodoxy but the accepted wisdom has long been the idea of putting a big-car’s big engine into an intermediate-size platform began in 1964 with the arrival of the Pontiac GTO.  It may be however that Pontiac got the idea from America’s ideological foe, the Soviet Union, which anticipated the concept by two years because between 1962-1970, GAZ produced the intermediate sized M-23 Volga (a special-variant of the M-21) for the exclusive use of the KGB and other Soviet “special services”.  Equipped with the 5.53 litre (337 cubic inch) V8 engine from the big GAZ-13 Chaika (Gull) (1959-1981 and in the Soviet hierarchy, second only to the even bigger ZIL limousines (1936-2012)), the car was said to be a not entirely successful piece of engineering but it was certainly faster than the four-cylinder model on which it was based.  It’s never been clear just what was the top speed because the speedometer was calibrated only to 180 km/h (112 mph) but one intrepid KGB apparatchik claimed to have achieved that and reported his Volga was “still accelerating”.  Like some of the US muscle cars which were produced only in small numbers, in its eight-year run, GAZ made only 603 M-23 Volgas (rare thus compared with a US equivalent, the 1970 Plymouth Hemi ‘Cuda which in that year alone numbered 670) but it perhaps more than the GTO deserves a place in history as the first muscle car.

1971 Plymouth Hemi Roadrunner.

Between 1964-1970, the muscle car movement would evolve into wilder and increasingly more powerful machinery, an evolution which unfolded in unison with similar developments on the ever lighter pony car platforms.  Things peaked in 1970 but by then the writing was not so much on the wall as on bill papers in the Congress and the revised contract schedules of insurance companies, an onrush of safety and emission-control regulation alone perhaps enough to kill the muscle car ecosystem but the enormous rise in insurance premiums was the final killer.  The combination of affordable high power in cars with dubious handling and braking in packages which appealed to males aged 17-25 had proved a lethal combination and the insurance industry reacted.  In name, the muscle cars would linger on for a couple of seasons but demand had collapsed a combination of circumstances which pre-dated the first oil shock in 1973 which would otherwise likely have been the death knell.

Ancestors of the muscle car

1936 Buick Century 66S Coupé (Fisher body style # 36457).

Although the improvement in the economy remained patchy, Buick rang in the changes for 1936, re-naming its entire line.  Notably, one newly designated offering was the Century, a revised version of the model 60, created by replacing the 233 cubic inch (3.8 litre) straight eight with the 320 cubic inch (5.2 litre) unit from the longer, heavier Roadmaster.  Putting big engines into small cars was nothing new and during the interwar years some had taken the idea to extremes, using huge aero-engines, but those tended to be one-offs for racing or speed-record attempts.  In Europe, (slightly) larger engines were sometimes substituted and British manufacturers often put six cylinder power-plants where once there had been a four but their quest was usually for smoothness and refinement rather than outright speed and the Century was really the first time a major manufacturer had used the concept in series production.  It’s regarded by many as the last common ancestor (LCA) of the muscle car.

Much muscle: 1933 Napier-Railton, fitted with a 23.9 litre (1461 cubic inch) W12, naturally aspirated aero-engine.  Between 1933-1937, it would set 47 world speed records in England, France and the United States.  Fuel consumption at speed was an impressive 4.2 mpg (imperial gallons) (67.29 litres/100 kilometers).

The Century gained its name from British slang, “doing the century” meaning to attain 100 mph (161 km/h) on a public road, then a reasonable achievement given the machinery and the roads of the day.  In production between 1936-1942, the Buick’s positioning of the Century in the market was hinted at by initially offering a range of four two door coupés & convertibles and a solitary four door sedan although subsequent demand saw further variations of the latter added in 1938.  Always the most expensive of the short wheelbase (SWB) line, the high-performance Century was as much a niche model as the later muscle cars would be and the Century never constituted more than 10% of production but demand was steady and it remained available until civilian production of cars was prematurely curtailed early in 1942.

1958 Jaguar 3.4.  VDU 881 was a Jaguar factory car on loan to Mike Hawthorn (1929–1959; FI world champion 1958) who tuned it further and used it both as a road car and for racing.  In VDU 881 he was killed in a motorway accident in treacherous conditions and although high speed was certainly a factor, the exact reason for the crash will never be known, the most common theory being the behavior of the early radial-ply tyres which, although raising the limits of adhesion beyond that of the earlier cross-plys, did tend suddenly to lose grip at the limit rather than gradually and predictably sliding towards that point.

One obvious spiritual ancestor from across the Atlantic was the Jaguar 3.4 (1957-1959), created by the same formula which would become Detroit’s muscle car template: take a big engine from a big car and put it in a small car.  The Jaguar 2.4 had been on sale since 1955, a successful incursion into the market segment BMW would later define with the 3 Series (1975-).  Jaguar had not deliberately neglected the small saloon segment since 1949 but in the early post-war years lacked the capacity to add another line, their resources fully absorbed by production of the XK120 (1948-1654) sports car and the big saloon, the Mark V (1948-1951).  It wasn’t until after the new big car, the Mark VII (1951-1956) had been released that attention (as Project Utah) could be turned to development of a smaller line and that emerged in 1955 as the 2.4, running a short-stroke, 2.5 litre (152 cubic inch) version of the XK-six, the package carefully honed to ensure a genuine 100 mph (161 km/h) was attainable.  Instantly successful, it quickly became the company’s biggest seller and within two years, responding to demand, a 3.4 litre (210 cubic inch) version was released.

Bob Jane in 1959 Jaguar Mk 2 3.8 (with 4.1 litre engine) winner of the Australian Touring Car Championship, Mallala, South Australia, 1963.

Because of the importance of the US market, much emphasis was put on the availability of an automatic transmission but the manual versions were also much fancied, rapid on the road and in racing but even at the time, there were comments that perhaps the power available exceeded the capability of the platform.  Jaguar did (at least partially) acknowledge things weren’t ideal by offering disc brakes, an option which proved popular.  Substantial revisions to the underpinnings weren’t however undertaken until the release in 1959 of the Mark 2 (the earlier 2.4 & 3.4 retrospectively dubbed Mark 1) which much improved the car’s manners.  However, although now fitted with a 3.8 litre (231 cubic inch) XK-six, the new car was heavier so there wasn’t that much of a lift in performance and, at the limit, both could be a handful, even in the hands of experts.  So, even if some don't call it a muscle car, it could behave like one.