Dzoeq Tanq Panq is named by ethnographers as the 'last Great Ancestor', the most recent forefather common to all living Akha patrilines. In Morton's account of the Akha cosmos, the ancestors are figured as a phallic 'Ancestral tower' whose base is formed by the lines descending from the seven offspring of Dzoeq Tanq Panq and which rises through the apical ancestors to the supreme creator Aqpoeq Miqyaer. Sources differ on the ancestor's gender: while the patrilineal reckoning treats the figure as a forefather, some contemporary Akha and Hani scholars in China have concluded that Dzoeq Tanq Panq, like the primal ancestor Mq Ma, was originally a maternal ancestor, a revision bound up with debates over an older matrifiliative layer in Akha descent.