The Ancestor's Tale: A Pilgrimage to the Dawn of Evolution

Richard Dawkins presents a comprehensive examination of evolution in this revised edition. Structured loosely on Chaucer's Canterbury Tales, the work traces human ancestry back through four billion years of life on Earth. The narrative progresses through forty "rendezvous points" where modern humans and other organisms meet their common ancestors. As the journey continues backward in time, the group of pilgrims expands to include other primates, then mammals, and eventually all life forms back to the first primordial organism. Dawkins's approach reveals connections between humans and all other living things in a novel way. The work addresses major aspects of evolutionary history and theory, including sexual selection, speciation, convergent evolution, extinction, genetics, plate tectonics, and geographical dispersal. The book combines a survey of current biological thinking with a history of life on Earth, demonstrating the remarkable nature of human history and the intimate relationship between humans and the rest of the living world.