monogenesis

English edit

monogenesis (usually uncountable, plural monogeneses)

(anthropology) The theory that mankind originated with a single ancestor or ancestral couple.
- 2003, Roy Porter, Flesh in the Age of Reason, Penguin, published 2004, page 248:
  Some held that negritude was a product of living under the tropical sun, a perhaps beneficial adaptation to a fierce climate – an environmentalist solution chiming with monogenesis and Lockean malleability models.
(linguistics) The theory that all languages, or a particular set of languages, originated from a single source.
(biology, medicine) Development of the ovum from a parent like itself.
1. (biology, medicine) Asexual/nonsexual reproduction, which involves only one parent.
The emergence from a single cause or origin.
- 2003, Maria Tatar, The Hard Facts of the Grimms' Fairy Tales, Princeton University Press, →ISBN, page 64:
  The view that one parent tale in one fixed location spawned numerous progeny the world over has come to be known as the theory of monogenesis and diffusion. The contrasting theory of polygenesis assumes that resemblances among tales can be attributed to independent invention in places unconnected by trade routes or travel.