ancestral

1. (India, law) A descendant of one's ancestors.Examples: "He considered that the local custom permitted a sister's son to inherit in default of near male ancestrals."; "But ancestrals cannot be willed away ."; "Having no regards for their ancestrals and parents."India

2. (biology) A genetic precursor.Examples: "The intermediate nature of the gene frequencies of the populations in the two groupings to those of the putative ancestrals, Table 4, indicates the Mestizo gentic constitution of the MMA populations and supports previous information for this area (Garza-Chapa 1983b)"; "All the ancestrals with unknown origin or pedigree were included within this group."; "Some of the tequila ancestrals and añejos have a subdominant odor to them — the smoky, vanilla-like syringaldehyde that is also in coastal raicillas and bacanoras ."

3. (logic) A relationship in which something is a precursor.Examples: "Like all ordinary ancestrals, remote successor is logically reflexive."; "One can take advantage of the ancestrals of basic relations such as RemoteSuccessor, to define Quace structure as follows internal to Proposal A:"; "I thus naturally extend the notation introduced for the ancestrals of structural relations between arcs to the nonstructural relations Sponsor and Erase, and to relations defined in terms of them like Successor."