  Solving the recombination equation has been a long-standing challenge of
\emph{deterministic} population genetics. We review recent progress obtained by
introducing ancestral processes, as traditionally used in the context of
\emph{stochastic} models of population genetics, into the deterministic
setting. With the help of an ancestral partitioning process, which is obtained
by letting population size tend to infinity (without rescaling parameters or
time) in an ancestral recombination graph, we obtain the solution to the
recombination equation in a transparent form.
