history of - Where did the "Memories transferred through DNA" idea used in Assassin's Creed come from?

In the Assassin's Creed series, one of the major plot devices involves using a machine to explore the memories of the main character's ancestors. The theory behind it is that your DNA stores all the memories of your ancestors within it, and by tapping into them with the Animus machine, you can experience them again. Dr. Warren Vidic, one of the scientists who developed the Animus, explains that it is like an animal's instinctual ability to know where to migrate to, or how to hunt food, without being taught. The knowledge, through the memories of their ancestors, is stored in their DNA.

Is this concept original to Assassin's Creed, or has it appeared previously in a scifi/fantasy work? What is the history of the idea?

Answer

The idea of a genetic or racial memory is very old. The first literary reference to it that I can find in fiction is from J. R. R. Tolkien, who explores the idea of a linguistic race memory in The Lost Road and The Notion Club Papers, and speculates about the real world in English and Welsh. Prior to that, Carl Jung talks about it in great detail in Psychology of the Unconscious, which is a Psychology book. Even before that, Jean-Baptiste Lamarck offered a theory that's become known as Lamarckism which asserts that organisms pass memories on to each other.

In antiquity, the Vikings believed that they had the memories of their ancestors as well, but in reverse: They thought that they themselves were able to influence their offspring after they were dead. Essentially they are the same thing, only they attributed the effect to a supernatural cause and not RNA or Memory. The upshot is that their offspring would have access to their own memories, the same condition which would result from any of the theories above, despite the superstitious mechanism and the essential reversal of point of view.