ancestral

Example Sentences

Examples are provided to illustrate real-world usage of words in context. Any opinions expressed do not reflect the views of Dictionary.com.

For the first time in more than 80 years, the fish swam in their ancestral river, where they had once been abundant.

From Los Angeles Times • Apr. 4, 2026

Now in her 80s, Lami Ezekiel remembers construction crews arriving in her ancestral home in Maitama, as it was destroyed to build Nigeria's capital, Abuja.

From BBC • Apr. 3, 2026

By comparing how these gene clusters are arranged across hundreds of plant genomes and tracing their patterns from ancestral species to modern plants, they were able to detect conserved elements that earlier methods had missed.

From Science Daily • Mar. 14, 2026

Mojtaba Khamenei, the second son of his father, was born in 1969, in the religious city of Mashhad, in the family’s ancestral home.

From The Wall Street Journal • Mar. 9, 2026

The thirteen finches were not created by some divine whim, but by “natural descent”—cascading downward and outward from an original ancestral finch.

From "The Gene" by Siddhartha Mukherjee