Lineage (anthropology)

Lineage is like a family tree, but much much bigger. In anthropology, a lineage refers to a group of people who are all related to each other in a very specific way. They all come from the same ancestor or the same group of ancestors. It's like a big group of cousins who all share the same grandparents, great-grandparents, and so on.

Now, this lineage doesn't just include people who are alive now. It can also include people who lived a long time ago. Anthropologists study lineages to understand how a group of people is connected over time. They want to know things like where they came from, how they lived, what they believed, and how they interacted with other lineages.

So if we were to draw out the lineage, it would be like a very very large family tree with lots of branches and leaves. Each branch represents a different subgroup of the lineage, all connected by the same ancestor(s). And over time, each branch may split off into even more branches as new generations are born.

Overall, lineage is just a fancy word for a big family tree that shows how a group of people are all related to each other over many many years.