Meanings of distant ancestors in English

For some reason, ostriches' distant ancestors went for a different system.

It could have been one of Stephen's distant ancestors.

Essentially, this means calling on Barclays Africa to pay for the sins of one of its distant ancestors.

Selective pressures are still at work; they just happen to be different than those faced by our distant ancestors.

Did the results mean my very distant ancestors were Nigerian, or that my biological father was probably from there?

In fact, our guest thinks that modern humans have kept a lot of primitive features from our distant ancestors.

Suppose that, by chance, among the distant ancestors of this crab, one arose that resembled, even slightly, a human face.

This is what my distant ancestors must have felt when they made their pilgrimage to the Temple three times a year.

It is not that she is some atavistic true believer, but that tradition comforts and calms her, as it did her distant ancestors.

The common ancestor of lampreys and hagfish, whatever it looked like, diverged from our distant ancestors even earlier, perhaps half a billion years ago.

She fingered the girl's broad ring which had come from distant ancestors, the ring which Sir Aimery of Beaumanoir had worn in the Crusades.

Indeed, although isogamy has long gone out of fashion for plants and animals, the distant ancestors of both groups are thought to have been isogamous.

And today our computers, unrecognizably different in size, speed, and capability from their distant ancestors, populate the full machine-line continuum of computational types and capabilities.

Our bodies are a quirky mix of new and old, with strokes of genius alongside glitches and imperfections which are all inherited from distant ancestors.

(What distant ancestors had given me this stupid conscience?

"Aliens whose distant ancestors are from Earth."