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.