The phrase "as being ancestral" is correct and usable in written English.
It can be used when discussing something that is related to or derived from ancestors or heritage.
Example: "The traditions we follow are valued as being ancestral, connecting us to our roots."
Alternatives: "considered ancestral" or "regarded as ancestral".
Mercifully, there is now much less equivocation over the relationships of vertebrates to their living relatives, none of which are thought of as being ancestral.
For a time, this group of primates was suggested as being ancestral to anthropoid primates, especially by one of the study's co-authors Philip Gingerich (Gingerich 1980; Gingerich et al. 1994), but this view has recently fallen out of favor (Ross and Kay 2004).
They share some traits with the most basal primates, and thus are often confused as being ancestral to modern monkeys, apes, and humans.
In statistical parsimony, the most frequent and most connected haplotype is regarded as being ancestral [18].
Duplicate deletions (43%) are observed as being ancestral (prespeciation).
The classic view [ 9, 10] places turtles as the sister group to all other reptiles, mostly on the basis of the lack of temporal fenestration in the skull, a character considered as being ancestral for Reptilia.
While it is problematic to assign ancestral versus derived states to gene duplicates originating from WGD events, we reasoned that a paralog within an ohnolog pair could be characterized as being ancestral-like or derived-like based on the extent of gene-neighborhood conservation it shared with a single-copy ortholog in an outgroup genome.
These morphological adaptations make it difficult to compare turtles with other organisms and to establish the polarity of numerous anatomical characters as either being ancestral or derived.
Author's response: As mentioned above, the precise phylogeny of these GTPases is uncertain, as is the ancestral status of the P-loop glycine.
EST and genome sequencing projects will provide data to assess whether AS was an ancestral feature of eukaryotic organisms, playing another important role in the complex RNA processing of early eukaryotes [ 7, 38].
It seems to me impossible to understand a historian's motivation if one doesn't understand his own, as it were, ancestral connections with the subject.
