Ur-ancestor

Often the ancestors were asked to intercede with the being who wielded the greatest power of all over the Shang people, the ur-ancestor known as the “Lord on High” (shangdi).

In both, the first awareness of other creatures by the ur-ancestor (and therefore the first true self-consciousness) arrives through a feeling of a crowd on the skin.

These two lineages converged somewhere in the late Paleozoic or early Triassic in a common “Ur-ancestor.”