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

Their loved one's ashes are placed inside and the space turned into an ancestral shrine.

From BBC • Mar. 31, 2026

His research took him to the family’s ancestral home in Odessa; to Belle-Epoque Paris; and to the Palais Ephrussi in Vienna, where the netsuke resided until Austria fell under Nazi rule.

From The Wall Street Journal • Mar. 30, 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

Native Americans, possibly ancestral to the modern Inuit, spread throughout the High Arctic around 2000 B.C.

From "Guns, Germs, and Steel: The Fates of Human Societies" by Jared M. Diamond