In the Know Direction podcast they said that it's Both. The word is ambiguous so they can use it for both race and cultural variations of a given race. SO yeah!
Ancestry is both, it was specifically mentioned as such in one of the threads - enabling more design space
I guess what I'm getting at is that it is problematic if it is both.
A human raised by orcs shouldn't be able to take the "stab people with your tusks" feat. How do you do that in the rules though if the character's species isn't part of the rules anywhere?
Conflating species and culture creates more problems than it solves. If the human above gets to pick from the 'orc tribes of Belkzen" list he is eligible for the tusks feat. If he gets to pick from the 'human' list he is eligible for cultural things he wouldn't have been exposed to in Belkzen. There might not even *be* a human list, there might be an Andoran list, an Osirian list, and so on. Why should he have access to any of those cultural traditions if he was raised from infancy in an orc tribe?
Why don't you wait and see how the new feats are written?
Right now you're assuming that they're just going to copy/paste the old feats into the new book.
I'm willing to be that the feats get rewritten to fit with the whole Ancestry thing. I'm also willing to be that they don't just copy/paste feats that don't fit.
I guess what I'm getting at is that it is problematic if it is both.
A human raised by orcs shouldn't be able to take the "stab people with your tusks" feat. How do you do that in the rules though if the character's species isn't part of the rules anywhere?
Conflating species and culture creates more problems than it solves. If the human above gets to pick from the 'orc tribes of Belkzen" list he is eligible for the tusks feat. If he gets to pick from the 'human' list he is eligible for cultural things he wouldn't have been exposed to in Belkzen. There might not even *be* a human list, there might be an Andoran list, an Osirian list, and so on. Why should he have access to any of those cultural traditions if he was raised from infancy in an orc tribe?
This is understandeable, but n.b. it's nothing new; you could very easily and legally construct a nonsensical background from alternate racial traits in PF1, which also combined ancestry and background, as well. I'm okay with some degree of manual supervision being required in any baroque exception-based system, whether that takes the form of letting a player take ancestry feats not of her official ancestry because it makes sense with her backstory, or requiring a fictional explanation for why the human raised by orcs has the tusks feat ("I learned orcish head-butting techniques, which let me do an equivalent amount of unarmed damage!"), or whatever.
I'm pretty sure that Ancestry is strictly the abilities you gain from your race or bloodline. A dev did mention the possibility of Ancestries being tied to specific noble bloodlines and the like - to use a LotR example, this would mean "Dunedain" could be an Ancestry.
The culture aspects seem like they are being folded along with Traits into something called Background.