The Ancestor's Tale
The Ancestor's Tale: A Pilgrimage to the Dawn of Life is a science book by Richard Dawkins and Yan Wong on the subject of evolution, which follows the path of humans backwards through evolutionary history, describing some of humanity's cousins as they converge on their common ancestors. It was first published in 2004, and substantially updated in 2016.
The book was nominated for the 2005 Aventis Prize for Science Books.
Synopsis
The book takes a different path backwards through evolution and meets different groupings of organisms. The authors use backward chronology instead of forward chronology as a way of celebrating the unity of life. In a backward chronology, the ancestors of any set of species must eventually meet at a particular moment. The last common ancestor is the one that they all share which the authors call a "concestor". The oldest concestor is the ancestor of all surviving life forms on this planet. The evidence for this is that all organisms share the same genetic code and was not invented twice. There is no sign of other independent origins of life and if new ones would now arise, they would probably be eaten.This book is a pilgrimage to discover our ancestors and meet other pilgrims who join as the book reaches a common ancestor that man shares with them. The reader reads of 40 rendezvous before hitting the origin of life itself.
The book's structure is inspired by Geoffrey Chaucer's The Canterbury Tales and its pilgrims. For instance, how new species come about, how the axolotl never needs to mature, how hard it is to classify animals, and why our fish-like ancestors moved to the land.
Concestors
The authors use the term concestor, coined by Nicky Warren, for the most recent common ancestor at each rendezvous point. At each rendezvous point, we meet the concestor of ourselves and the listed species or collection of species. This does not mean that the concestor was much like those creatures; after the "rendezvous", our fellow "pilgrims" have had as much time to evolve and change as we have. Along the way, the authors introduce new pilgrims who join us on the trip backwards through time.Chapters
Prologue
Primates
| Rendezvous point | Time | New Pilgrim | Story |
| 0 | All Humankind | The Tasmanian's Tale illustrates the identical ancestors point starting from which all living people trace exactly the same set of ancestors back in time. | |
| 0 | All Humankind | Eve's Tale touches upon coalescent theory, Mitochondrial Eve, Y-chromosomal Adam and polymorphism. The story ends with a speculation that the ABO blood group system in humans and chimps are examples of trans-specific polymorphism; a type-B human may actually be more closely related to type-B chimp than type-B human is related to type-A human, from the perspective of the genes responsible for the antigens. | |
| 0 | All Humankind | The Ergast's Tale recounts how a mutated form of the FOXP2 gene could have allowed Homo ergaster to acquire language. | |
| 0 | All Humankind | The Handyman's Tale explains how Homo habilis acquired high 'brain to body mass ratio', at the same time introducing logarithmic scale and scatterplot as tools for scientific studies. | |
| 0 | All Humankind | Little Foot's Tale examines how hominid first learned to walk on two legs. | |
| 1 | 6 mya | Chimpanzees | Human pilgrims join their evolutionary cousins, chimpanzees and bonobos. See also Chimpanzee–human last common ancestor |
| 2 | 7 mya | Gorillas | The Gorilla's Tale considers human's changing attitude towards the great apes, ending with a discussion on racism, speciesism and the Great Ape Project. See also Gorilla–human last common ancestor |
| 3 | 14 mya | Orangutans | The Orangutan's Tale introduces the principle of parsimony and its use in construction of family tree of species. Orangutan is the last of the great apes to join the pilgrimage. See also Orangutan–human last common ancestor |
| 4 | 18 mya | Gibbons | The Gibbon's Tale further elaborates on neighbor-joining, parsimony and textual criticism techniques used to construct cladograms. When the simple principle of parsimony proves inadequate to handle 'long branch attraction' problems caused by convergence. The phylogenetic tree and computational phylogenetic methods such as maximum likelihood analysis are introduced. The tale ends with yet another example of trans-specific polymorphism: sexual dimorphism; the male testis-determining factor gene has never been in a female body, at least since long before gibbons and humans diverged. This serves to highlight the fact that different phylogenetic trees can be created by tracing different sets of genes; the one mainstream 'species tree' is nothing more than a summary of multitude of gene trees, a 'majority vote' among gene trees. Gibbon is the last ape to join the pilgrimage. See also Gibbon–human last common ancestor |
| 5 | 25 mya | Old World Monkeys | Old World monkeys, being in the same Catarrhini clade as apes, are closer cousins to apes than to New World monkeys. Old World monkeys are sometimes called the 'tailed apes'. It is not known if the actual common ancestor had a tail or not. |
| 6 | 40 mya | New World Monkeys | The Howler Monkey's Tale is a story of how gene duplication of genes can create new genes. Over time, these duplicates mutate and drift. Mammals were nocturnal when dinosaurs existed in this world and were dichromatic but humans are trichromatic. Trichromatic genes originated from duplication of the opsin gene. Trichromatic vision helps to detect food and more succulent leaves so over time New and Old world monkeys gained this type of vision through chromosomal translocation. New World monkeys 1st attained trichromacy in the female population by making green and red alleles for the same locus for the opsin gene on the X-chromosome, an example of polymorphism. An example of heterozygote advantage is that the males who have only 1 copy of the X-chromosome, remained dichromats with either a green or a red opsin. Howler monkeys are a type of New World monkey who took it one step further and achieved trichromacy for both sexes by its X-chromosome which obtained 2 loci for both the green and the red allele. New World monkeys floated over the Atlantic Ocean most likely once and are now found only in South America. |
| 7 | 60 mya | Tarsiers | Nocturnal animal with very large eyes. Unlike other nocturnal mammals the eyes do not have a tapetum lucidum which reflects light from the back of the eye for a second exposure on the retina to maximize light capture. The ancestor of the tarsier was a diurnal animal which lost the tapetum lucidum to prevent images from reflected light. Update from the first edition is that the earliest fossil Archicebus was discovered in China. |
| 8 | 65 mya | Lemurs and Bushbabies | The pilgrimage meets with the rest of the strepsirrhine cousins: the lemurs, pottos, bushbabies, and lorises. The Aye-Aye's Tale showcases the strange lemurs which are only found on the island of Madagascar. Madagascar was originally part of the Gondwana super-continent which included present Africa continent and Indian subcontinent. Gondwana broke off into drifting blocks of land, some of which became Africa, India and Madagascar. As an estranged island, Madagascar became a speciation hotbed. A small founding population of strepsirrhine primates diversified into all niches of the ecosystem, in the absence of monkeys. Madagascar, with a land mass 1/1000 of Earth's total land area, houses unique species that account for 4% of all species of animals and plants. |
occurred 65 million years ago, due to an asteroid impact event which created the Chicxulub Crater, possibly aided by large scale volcanic activities in the Deccan traps.
Non-primate mammals
Non-mammal chordates
| Rendezvous point | Time | New Pilgrim | Story |
| 16 | 320 mya | Sauropsids | The term reptile is not a true clade name, as it fails to include birds which share a common ancestry. Dinosaurs, unfortunately as an extinct species, cannot join us. But their only surviving descendants, the birds, take their place in the pilgrimage. |
| 16 | 320 mya | Sauropsids | The Lava Lizard’s Tale is about the animals that inhabit the Galapagos Islands and known for their immense diversity. |
| 16 | 320 mya | Sauropsids | The Galapagos Finch's Tale is an example of how quickly evolution can happen. Peter Grant and his students went to the Galapagos Islands every year to study finches. In 1977, a drought caused a drop in food supply. The team calculated that the survivors were more than 5% larger. Also, the average beak size was larger in the surviving group. Larger birds with larger beaks were more efficient at dealing with the big seeds which had survived the drought. Also, males were larger than females and thus the males' larger beaks increased their survival over the females. This created a 5:1 sex ratio and competition among the males. The winners of the sexual competition were the largest males with the largest beaks. So natural selection was causing the population to evolve larger body size and larger beaks again, but this time through sexual reproduction. When the drought ended, the large tough seeds became rare in comparison with the smaller, softer seeds. Now smaller finches with smaller beaks had the advantage because large finches needed more of them to maintain their larger bodies which caused the evolutionary trend of the drought years to reversed. |
| 16 | 320 mya | Sauropsids | The Peacock's Tale is a visualization of sexual selection. Peacock's true tail used to be made out of black feather, but over time changed through sexual selection. Females prefer males with larger & more attractive feathers so over time, through sexual selection, the feathers became more beautiful. In humans, the female sex evoked faster and grew less hairy. The male sex was "dragged in its wake". |
| 16 | 320 mya | Sauropsids | The Dodo's Tale describes the bird's loss of wings upon first arriving in Mauritius. A pigeon's descendants lost their wings due to the absence of predators. The dodo trusted the Portuguese sailors. Their trust and inability to fly caused their extinction in less than two hundred years by the introduction of dogs, pigs, and rats who ate their eggs and religious refugees who destroyed dodo's habitat by building sugar plantations. Many species of birds have evolved flightless forms on islands. |
| 16 | 320 mya | Sauropsids | The Elephant Bird's Tale is a complete rewrite in the second edition. It discusses the large Moa-like bird of Madagascar and its possible connection to the roc legend. |
| 17 | 340 mya | Amphibians | Mammals and reptiles join the amphibians to meet the ancestor of all land vertebrates with four feet, the tetrapod. Amphibians include frogs, toads, salamanders, newts and caecilians. While amniotes either give live births or lay waterproof eggs, the amphibians retain the ancestral practice of laying eggs in water. Unlike the waterproof skin of amniotes, the amphibian skin allows body water to evaporate through it, restricting amphibians to land areas with access to fresh water. Almost no amphibians live in salt water which explains why they are seldom found on islands. The concestor probably already had settled on five digits on each limb. |
| 17 | 340 mya | Amphibians | The Salamander's Tale uses examples of ring species to illustrate how a continuous series of interbreeding animals in the spatial dimension is conceptually equivalent to that in the time dimension. The Ensatina salamanders in the Central Valley in California form a continuous ring around the valley. Any two neighbouring population of Ensatina around the horseshoe can interbreed, but the plain Ensatina eschscholtzii on the western end of the horseshoe cannot interbreed with the large blotched Ensatina klauberi on the eastern end. Larus gulls form another ring species which starts at the herring gull in Great Britain and ends at the lesser black-backed gull in north-western Europe. The authors liken both ring species in space to the ring in time that unites humans and chimpanzees via generations of ancestors over 6 million years, with concestor 1 in the midpoint. |
| 17 | 340 mya | Amphibians | The Narrowmouth's Tale shows how speciation may still continue via parapatric speciation, when two closely related toad species meet again after initial geographical isolation. Gastrophryne olivacea and Gastrophryne carolinensis are closely related and can interbreed when their habitats overlap. But reinforcement, a selection process which increases reproductive isolation via character displacement, causes both species to differentiate their mating calls from each other by shifting pitch and duration in opposite directions; the more the two populations overlap, the more distinct their mating calls become. |
| 17 | 340 mya | Amphibians | The Axolotl's Tale is about metamorphosis, a biological process which turns juveniles or larvae into drastically dissimilar adult forms for reproduction, and about pedomorphosis, another process which enables juveniles of some species to become sexually mature without ever developing into their usual adult forms. Species which undergo metamorphosis include butterflies, barnacles and salamanders. Species which exhibit neoteny, a type of pedomorphosis, include human, ostrich, pekingese and axolotl. A text book example of neoteny, the axolotls are members of the tiger salamander complex, yet they become sexually mature in larva form, remaining aquatic and gilled. With a treatment of thyroxine, it is possible to induce an axolotl to develop into a salamander, demonstrating that axolotl genome still retains information on its lost adult form. On the other hand, the newt, a type of salamander, first develops from tadpole into land-based salamander, but later reverts to its juvenile tadpole form, and returns to the water to reproduce. The axolotl's tale reminds us that paedomorphosis often allows species to break out of an evolutionary dead end by sudden changes. |
| 18 | 415 mya | Lungfish | Despite their morphological similarities, the lungfish and coelacanth are very different genetically, as expected of species which lived separately for more than 400 million years. One lungfish has the record for largest genome at 133 billion base pairs compared to our 3 billion base pairs. |
| 18 | 415 mya | Lungfish | The Lungfish's Tale traces the missing links from ray-finned fish through Tiktaalik. Since the first edition footprints found in Zachełmie, Poland has pushed back the date of first tetrapods by 18 million years. It is possible that this concestor was not trying to get to land but from tide pool to tide pool. |
| 19 | 420 mya | Coelacanths | The Coelacanth’s Tale describes the discovery of this living fossil once thought extinct and that calling it a living fossil might not be correct. The authors also explain transposable elements. |
| 20 | 430 mya | Ray-Finned Fish | The current pilgrimage consisting of all descendants of lobe-finned fish is joined by the equally successful ray-finned fishes which includes sturgeon, paddlefish, eel, herring, carp, salmon, trout, seahorse, cod, etc. to meet concestor 19, the bony fish. Of all ray-finned fishes, most belong to the large infraclass teleostei. |
| 20 | 430 mya | Ray-Finned Fish | Some teleost fishes evolved unfishy shapes to cope with their chosen ecological niches. The leafy sea dragon, for instance, abandons the typical streamline fish shape which works so well for the majority of fishes. Instead, it adopts a leafy shape to hang motionless in kelp forest, pretending to be a piece of seaweed. The razorfish takes up an elongated, laterally compressed body, together with a long, flattened snout. It swims in a head-down vertical stance, allowing it to hide amongst tall spines of a sea urchin. The snipe eel is ridiculously thin, while the gulper eel sports jaws which look disproportionally large for its body. Lastly, the ocean sunfish resembles a huge, two-ton disc or millstone, as its Latin name, Mola mola, suggests. The Leafy Sea Dragon's Tale demonstrates how animal shapes are malleable, ever changing to meet the requirements of each animal's way of life. |
| 20 | 430 mya | Ray-Finned Fish | The Pike's Tale describes the swim bladder. Contrary to common assumptions, the swim bladder did not evolve into lungs. Instead, the bony fish ancestor possessed a primitive lung which was co-opted by teleost fishes for buoyancy control, and in some cases as an ear drum for hearing. The teleost fishes rely on gills for breathing underwater. They re-purposed the primitive lung, turning its ability to absorb and release gas into the blood stream to allow fish to move vertically in a water column. |
| 20 | 430 mya | Ray-Finned Fish | The Mudskipper's Tale was in the 1st edition and deleted in the 2nd edition. |
| 20 | 430 mya | Ray-Finned Fish | The rapid speciation of haplochromine cichlid fishes endemic to Lake Victoria, Lake Malawi and Lake Tanganyika exemplifies adaptive radiation and species flock. The Cichlid's Tale recounts how, by constructing an "unrooted haplotype network" using phylogenetic analysis on mitochondrial DNA of living species, researchers were able to infer the time and the location of each major speciation event. The haplotype network differs from normal phylogenetic tree in that each node represents a haplotype, not a species, and the node size is determined by number of species in which the haplotype is found. |
| 20 | 430 mya | Ray-Finned Fish | The Blind Cave Fish's Tale illustrates how normal organs can degenerate into vestigial organs. Different populations of Mexican tetra have ventured into dark caves separately, and each have evolved regressive traits such as white skin coloration or blind eyes. This could be explained by the opportunity cost theory; resources wasted on building the eye in a pitch-black cave deprives the fish of other traits more useful for such environment. Blind fish do not roll back the mutations that led to eyes. Dollo's Law explains that evolution cannot be precisely and exactly reversed. |
| 20 | 430 mya | Ray-Finned Fish | The Flounder's Tale is a tale of imperfection. The flounder's contorted head and eyes allow it to lie on its side on the ocean floor, and betray the lack of an intelligent designer. Natural selection works without foresight and makes gradual improvements on existing body plans. Because each creature at every step of the process must remain fit for its environment, evolution cannot make sudden and drastic changes to build a better future organism at the expense of current generation. |
| 21 | 460 mya | Sharks | Sharks, Rays and the related animals are supported by a cartilaginous skeleton that never ossifies to become bone. Their skin is covered in dermal denticles, tiny scale-like protrusions, from which teeth may have evolved. Sharks lack a swim bladder for buoyancy, and instead rely on swimming constantly, retaining urea in their blood, and having large livers with plenty of oil to remain afloat. Concestor 21 was an ancestor to all gnathostomes, animals with lower jaws, a structure which evolved from the gill arches. |
| 22 | 525 mya | Lampreys and Hagfish | Jawless and limbless fishes, the lampreys and hagfish, join the pilgrimage to meet the concestor of all vertebrates. The jawless fish and the concestor 22 are borderline vertebrates. Unlike the rest of vertebrates, they retain the notochord, a stiffening cartilage rod running along the back of an animal, well into adulthood. In all other vertebrates, the vestigial notochord appears in the embryo briefly and is replaced by segmented, articulate backbones in adults. On the other hand, both the jawless fish and the jawed fish share characteristics common to all members of the phylum Chordata at some time in their life cycle, including the notochord, pharyngeal slit, and the post-anal tail. |
| 22 | 525 mya | Lampreys and Hagfish | The Lamprey's Tale further develops the gene's eye view of ancestry and pedigree that earlier tales, The Eve's Tale and The Gibbon's Tale, alluded to. In human, four haemoglobin genes are known to be cousin genes of each other. An ancestor globin gene from an ancient vertebrate split into two genes, alpha and beta, which ended up in two different chromosomes and continued to evolve independently. Both alpha and beta further split into more independently evolving genes. All jawed fish show such alpha/beta split as predicated by evolution. However, lampreys and hagfish are ancient enough that they predate this gene split. In fact, jawless fishes, whenever investigated, do not possess split globin genes. As Dawkins explained in the chapter 'All Africa and her progenies' in his book River out of Eden, there are two ways to trace ancestry: via animals and via individual genes. The two mechanisms produce very different results. Ancestry of animals form a family tree. On the other hand, Ancestry of an individual gene is always a single chain going back to the first self-replicating RNA, since a gene is either a faithful copy or a mutated form of its single parent gene. The Ancestor's Tale is written from an animal's perspective, following the family tree of human backward in time. But the book could have been written from the gene's point of view. Starting from any gene, each gene duplication event could become a rendezvous point where pilgrimage of genes join their cousin genes. |
| 23 | 535 mya | Sea Squirts | The lancelet and sea squirt have been switched in the second edition based on DNA studies. A sea squirt resembles a sedentary bag of sea water anchored to a rock. It feeds on food particles strained from water. Anatomically, the sea squirt looks very different from the joining pilgrimage of all vertebrates and protochordates, that is, until its larvae are examined. The sea squirt larva looks and swims like a tadpole. it possesses a notochord and a dorsal nerve tube, and moves by undulating its post-anal tail from side to side. Vertebrates may have branched off from ancient sea squirt larvae via neoteny, in a process reminiscent of The Axolotl's Tale. But recent DNA analysis on larvacea favors Darwin's initial interpretation, that one branch of ancient tadpole-like protochordates evolved a new metamorphosis stage to turn into sedentary sea squirts. Sea squirts have some of the fastest recorded rates of molecular evolution. |
| 24 | 540 to 775 mya | Lancelets | Lancelets are a text book example of a chordate. Equipped with a notochord, a nerve tube on the dorsal side and gill slits, they typify the phylum Chordata. But lancelets are not primitive nor our remote ancestor. They are as modern as all other members in the pilgrimage. |
| 24 | 540 to 775 mya | Lancelets | The Lancelet's Tale continues to develop the theme introduced in The Duckbill's Tale, that all living animals have had equal time to evolve since the first concestor, and that no living animal should be described as either lower or more primitive. The authors extends this concept to apply to fossils as well. Even though it is tempting to label fossils as our remote ancestor, they are more accurately described as our distant cousins who have been frozen in time. |
Non-chordate animals
From the lancelets onward, The authors provide dates under duress stating that, "dating becomes so difficult and controversial that my courage fails me".| Rendezvous point | Time | New Pilgrim | Story | - |
| 25 | 550 mya | Ambulacrarians | This diverse group includes the echinoderms, along with some organisms labelled "worms" and even Xenoturbella, which until 2016 could not be classified at all, but analysis of its genes finally established its position as a distant relative of the echinoderms. | - |
| 26 | 560 mya | Protostomes | The deuterostomes are joined by the protostomes and this joint is the originator of the kingdom Animalia. Protostomes and deuterostomes is based on the way animal embryos diverge after gastrulation where the blastula indents to form a cup. In the sub-kingdom of protostomia, the indentation eventually becomes the mouth. In deuterostomia which includes humans, the indentation eventually becomes the anus; the mouth is formed later. This ancestor is sometimes referred to as Urbilaterian. This brings in the Insecta which represent three quarter of all animal species on Earth. | - |
| 26 | 560 mya | Protostomes | The Ragworm's Tale talks about the evolution of left-right symmetry in bilaterians. | - |
| 26 | 560 mya | Protostomes | The Brine Shrimp's Tale discusses the possibility of chordates having a back-swimming ancestor. | - |
| 26 | 560 mya | Protostomes | The Leaf Cutter's Tale discusses town like ant societies and their agricultural use of fungi. | - |
| 26 | 560 mya | Protostomes | The Grasshopper's Tale talks about the futility of discriminating between races. | - |
| 26 | 560 mya | Protostomes | The Fruit Fly's Tale introduces Hox genes. | - |
| 26 | 560 mya | Protostomes | The Rotifer's Tale talks about the outstanding paradox of sexual and asexual reproduction. | - |
| 26 | 560 mya | Protostomes | The Barnacle's Tale talks about palaentology and the deceptiveness of weird looking organisms. | - |
| 26 | 560 mya | Protostomes | The Velvet Worm's Tale talks about the Cambrian explosion. | - |
| 27 | 570 mya | Acoelomorph Flatworms | Still under debate on how this group fits in due to a long period of molecular evolution similar to the Gibbons Tale. These flatworms lack an anus or a coelom. The organs do not sit in a coelom but a parenchyma and is the reason for the name of the group. | |
| 28 | 590 mya | Cnidarians | The Jellyfish's Tale discusses how some underwater organisms migrate between different depths due to day and night cycles. | - |
| 28 | 590 mya | Cnidarians | The Polypifer's Tale covers Charles Darwin's explanation on how the coral reefs were formed. Then the section considers apparent similarities of ecological communities such as tropical forests or coral reefs to single body organisms. The cooperation of the organisms emerge because it is useful for the specific individuals who are willing to cooperate rather than because it is useful to the community as a whole. | - |
| 29 | 600 mya | Ctenophores | It is not completely clear whether Ctenophora should be placed here as an outgroup to all animals and actually at rendezvous 31. But this would mean that they either independently invented muscel, nerves, cell layers or that the sponges lost them. Only 100 species but quite numerous. DNA studies are also complicated by incomplete lineage sorting like with the Gibbon. | - |
| 30 | 620 mya | Placozoans | Only one species identified. It looks like a multicellular amoeba. | - |
| 31 | 650 mya | Sponges | The last animal of the chain. Do not move but have a coordinated movement between cells. Also, seems to be two lines of sponges based on molecular data. Sponge cells are totipotent | - |
| 31 | 650 mya | Sponges | The Sponge's Tale is an early 1907 experiment on mixing different sponge species cells to form new adult forms. | - |
Non-animal eukaryotes
There are important differences between the 1st and 2nd editions of the book in this section. Another rendezvous has been added and the unknown rendezvous has been partially resolved.| Rendezvous point | Time | New Pilgrim | Story |
| 32 | 800 mya | Choanoflagellates | The Choanoflagellate's Tale is about the evolution of multicellularity. Choanoflagellates are the closest living relatives of the multicellular animals, and can form temporary colonies from a free-living unicellular stage. Sponges have choanocytes, cells that resemble single-celled choanoflagellates, providing an indication about how multicellularity may have evolved. This common ancestor is sometimes called urmetazoan and several theories have been developed on its evolution. |
| 33 | 900 mya | Filastereans | New addition to 2nd edition based on 2008 work. Pushes all others back one. |
| 34 | 1000 mya | DRIPs | The acronym comes from the letters of the four genera that were first known. These are single cell parasites of fish another freshwater animals. DNA sequencing has added about 50 species. Of course this concestor could not have been a parasite of a fish. |
| 35 | 1200 mya | Fungi | Only 99,000 of the 4,000,000 estimated species have been identified. |
| 36 | Uncertain | A protozoan ragbag called Apusozoa made up of 3 protist groups breviata, ancyromonads and apusomonads. | |
| 37 | Amoebozoans | ‘Amoeba’ is a description rather than a classification because many unrelated eukaryotes exhibit an amoeboid form. | |
| 38 | Very large group of light harvesters and their kin. excavates, SAR supergroup, 20 species of single-celled glaucophytes, over 4,000 species of red algae, and hundreds of thousands of species of green plants. | The Cauliflower's Tale tells the story about how geometrical considerations of constructing the most efficient supply tube network in tissues dictate a scaling exponent of 3/4 for such different structures as a cauliflower and our brain. | |
| 38 | Very large group of light harvesters and their kin. excavates, SAR supergroup, 20 species of single-celled glaucophytes, over 4,000 species of red algae, and hundreds of thousands of species of green plants. | The Redwood's Tale explains different methods of radiometric dating such as Uranium–lead dating and Potassium-argon dating for old rocks all the way to Carbon dating to date material within the last 20,000 years. | |
| 38 | Very large group of light harvesters and their kin. excavates, SAR supergroup, 20 species of single-celled glaucophytes, over 4,000 species of red algae, and hundreds of thousands of species of green plants. | The Humped Bladderwort's Tale explains C value which is the amount of DNA in an organism. | |
| 38 | Very large group of light harvesters and their kin. excavates, SAR supergroup, 20 species of single-celled glaucophytes, over 4,000 species of red algae, and hundreds of thousands of species of green plants. | The Mixotrich's Tale is about the protist inside an Australian termite that has 4 different symbionts inside and on the surface of the organism. |
Great Historic Rendezvous
This is a significantly shorter section in the second edition. The authors describe the important beginnings of eukaryotic cells and describes the endosymbiotic theory proposed by Lynn Margulis.Prokaryotes
Prokaryotes can move genetic material between unicellular and/or multicellular organisms other than by the transmission of DNA from parent to offspring by way of Horizontal gene transfer.| Rendezvous point | Time | New Pilgrim | Story |
| 39 | Archaea | Archaea possess genes metabolic pathways more closely related to eukaryotes such as the enzymes involved in transcription and translation. | |
| 40 | Eubacteria | The Rhizobium's Tale talks about the evolution of the wheel in the flagella and how hard it is for larger organisms to develop wheels | |
| 40 | Eubacteria | Taq's Tale on the versatile enzyme used for PCR. |
Origin of life
The authors elaborate at length about the possible origins of life through RNA world, Enterobacteria phage Qbeta, Miller–Urey experiment, Spiegelman's Monster and the possible hypercycle of DNA, RNA, and enzymes which work together to support each other in a primordial world.Reception
of New York Times stated that the book is one of the best to understand evolutionary trees.The Guardian thought it was awkward to move backward in time starting from humans and required linguistic gymnastics with new definitions of before and after a certain evolutionary point. Matt Ridley at The Guardian liked the approach of a Chaucer Pilgrim traveling backwards and the perspective of not seeing other animals as failures.
Translations
| Edition | Name | Translator | Year |
| Chinese | 祖先的故事 | 顧曉哲 | 2020 |
| Czech | Příběh předka | Pavel Růt | 2008 |
| Dutch | :nl:Het verhaal van onze voorouders|Het verhaal van onze voorouders | Mark van Nieuwstadt | 2007 |
| French | :fr:Il était une fois nos ancêtres|Il était une fois nos ancêtres | Marie-France Desjeux-Lefort | 2007 |
| German | :de:Geschichten vom Ursprung des Lebens|Geschichten vom Ursprung des Lebens | Sebastian Vogel | 2008 |
| Hungarian | Az Ős meséje – Zarándoklat az élet hajnalához | Kovács Lajos | 2006 |
| Italian | :it:Il racconto dell'antenato. La grande storia dell'evoluzione|Il racconto dell'antenato | L. Serra | 2004 |
| Korean | 조상 이야기 | 이한음 | 2005 |
| Persian | :fa:داستان نیاکان|داستان نیاکان | ||
| Polish | :pl:The Ancestor’s Tale|The Ancestor’s Tale | ||
| Portuguese | :pt:The Ancestor's Tale|A grande história da evolução | Laura Teixeira Motta | 2009 |
| Spanish | :es:El cuento del antepasado|Historia de nuestros ancestros | Víctor Vicente Úbeda | 2008 |
| Turkish | :tr:Ataların Hikayesi|Ataların hikâyesi | Yaşamın Kökenine Yolculuk | 2015 |
| Serbian | Priče naših predaka | Tatjana Bižić | 2013 |
| Russian | :ru:Рассказ предка|Рассказ предка | С. И. Долотовская | 2015 |