The Ancestor’s Tale

I’m finally reading this Richard Dawkins opus. The language is a bit too convoluted, a bit too flowery, but the facts are interesting. He has taken the conceit of The Canterbury Tales and applied it to evolution. He traces, backwards in time, the various groups that join the line leading to us as we return to the original micro-organisms. Amazingly, there are only about 40 of these intersections.

Before the story really gets rolling, he looks at the immediate ancestors of humans.

Many people know that camels originated in the Americas but went extinct there and were preserved only because they had also reached Asia. It doesn’t send a shiver down our spines at the camels’ close brush with extinction.

Dawkins points out that, apparently, the hominin primates colonized Asia, went extinct in Africa, and then re-colonized Africa from Asia. That’s how far we are from being inevitable.

• The Farmer’s Tale
• The Cro-Magnon’s Tale
• The Tasmanian’s Tale
• Eve’s Tale
• The Neanderthal’s Tale
• The Ergast’s Tale
• The Handyman’s Tale
• The Little Foot’s Tale
• The Bonobo’s Tale
• The Gorilla’s Tale
• The Orang Utan’s Tale
• The Gibbon’s Tale
• The Howler Monkey’s Tale
• The Aye-Aye’s Tale
• The Colugo’s Tale
• The Mouse’s Tale
• The Beaver’s Tale
• The Hippo’s Tale
• The Seal’s Tale
• The Armadillo’s Tale
• The Marsupial Mole’s Tale
• The Duckbill’s Tale
• The Galapago Finch’s Tale
• The Peacock’s Tale
• The Dodo’s Tale
• The Elephant Bird’s Tale
• The Salamander’s Tale
• The Narrowmouth’s Tale
• The Axolotl’s Tale
• The Lungfish’s Tale
• The Leafy Sea Dragon’s Tale
• The Pike’s Tale
• The Mudskipper’s Tale
• The Chichlid’s Tale
• The Blind Cave Fish’s Tale
• The Flounder’s Tale
• The Lamprey’s Tale
• The Lancelet’s Tale
• The Ragworm’s Tale
• The Brine Shrimp’s Tale
• The Leaf Cutter’s Tale
• The Grasshopper’s Tale
• The Fruit Fly’s Tale
• The Rotifer’s Tale
• The Barnacle’s Tale
• The Velvet Worm’s Tale
• The Jellyfish’s Tale
• The Polypifer’s Tale
• The Sponge’s Tale
• The Choanoflagellate’s Tale
• The Cauliflower’s Tale
• The Redwood’s Tale
• The Mixotrich’s Tale
• The Rhizobium’s Tale
• Taq’s Tale

See it on my virtual bookshelf at BookCrossing: The Ancestor’s Tale by Richard Dawkins.