atavism

Meanings

1. 1
   noun

   the reappearance in an organism of a trait associated with a remote ancestor

   The unexpected tail-like structure was described as an atavism.

2. 2
   noun

   a return to an older behavior, outlook, method, or style

   Critics regarded the policy as an atavism from a less tolerant era.

3. 3
   noun

   a person or thing that embodies such an ancestral or earlier condition

   The narrator portrays the warrior as an atavism from a harsher age.

Simplified etymology

Atavism entered English in the mid-19th century for a tendency to revert to an ancestral type. It comes from Latin atavus, meaning a great-grandfather’s grandfather and, more generally, an ancestor, formed from at-, “beyond,” and avus, “grandfather.”

Borrowed in the nineteenth century from French atavisme, based on Latin atavus ('remote ancestor'). The scientific term for an ancestral trait later broadened to any apparent return to an earlier behavior, style, or condition.

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