The Ancestor’s Tale

The Ancestor's Tale by Richard Dawkins traces the human lineage back through evolutionary history, highlighting our shared ancestry with other species. The book is structured like Geoffrey Chaucer's The Canterbury Tales, following a chronological path backward from modern humans to our common ancestors with other life forms.1

Human evolution is the process by which humans developed on Earth from extinct primates. Humans, or Homo sapiens, are a species that likely evolved in Africa about 315,000 years ago. Our evolutionary history involves other hominin species, such as Ardipithecus, Australopithecus, and Neanderthals. The exact nature of our evolutionary relationships has been a subject of scientific investigation, with the understanding that there is a common ancestor millions of years ago from which various lineages diverged. This ancestral species is not a "missing link" but rather a point of divergence, and the human "family tree" is more accurately described as a "family bush".2