forerunner

The researchers showed that, elaborate as that chemical mechanism is in cells today, nearly all the ingredients for a potential forerunner to it could have formed easily from just two simple organic compounds reacting in water.

Melchior is the forerunner of the aunt who always gave me socks.

Turing conceived and built a computer, the forerunner of all digital computations, that cracked the code.

By contrast, Ashraf Ghani, the current forerunner in the partial second round results, got record support in Pashtun areas.

The organization started by Norquist is a forerunner to the Tea Party.

I see Dickens as the forerunner to people like Chaplin and Woody Allen, really.

It may be a forerunner or successor, the cause or consequence, or a contemporaneous fact, etc.

Poniatowski's campaign against Austria, glorious as it was for the Poles, was in reality the forerunner of disaster.

Forerunner of the many first-aid classes to come was that hour of Mabel's, and made memorable by one thing she said.

Nobody dreamed at that time that the little tool was the forerunner of a great change.

This is the first attempt at an anthology of Yorkshire poetry, and the forerunner of many other anthologies.