Space of ancient caloric functions on some manifolds beyond volume doubling

Under a condition that breaks the volume doubling barrier, we obtain a time polynomial structure result on the space of ancient caloric functions with polynomial growth on manifolds. As a byproduct, it is shown that the finiteness result for the space of harmonic functions with polynomial growth on manifolds in \cite{CM97} and \cite{Li97} are essentially sharp, except for the multi-end cases, addressing an issue raised in \cite{CM98} and removing all {\it local} topological or geometric conditions on the manifold with respect to a reference point.