The Ancestor’s Tale - Richard Dawkins

The Ancestor’s Tale is a pilgrimage: a journey of four billion years. We, modern human beings, are the pilgrims, and we are travelling back in time to seek out our ancestors.

Simultaneously every other living creature is setting off on its own journey with the same mission. Each pilgrim tells its tale along the way, and covers the processes involved in the unfolding of life on Earth.

Onwards we go, squeezing precariously through mass extinctions. Eventually we pass that fundamental turning point for life on Earth, the combining of a single-celled protozoan-to-be with a bacterium to form a cell with a nucleus. Once we have done so, all living things take the final stretch of the pilgrimage together to the origin of life.