Books like the ancestor's tale

The Ancestor's Tale: A Pilgrimage to the Dawn of Lifeis a 2004 popular science book by Richard Dawkins, with contributions from Dawkins' research assistant Yan Wong. It follows the path of humans backwards through evolutionary history, meeting humanity's cousins as they converge on common ancestors. Dawkins' longest book to date, it was nominated for the 2005 Aventis Prize for Science Books.

Much of this article describes the first edition. Updated research has been included in the second edition published in 2016.

Richard Dawkins writes that evolution rhymes and patterns recur. Not only is our universe capable of generating organisms, it is capable of evolving them too.

Evolution has no privilege line of descent and no designated end. Evolution has arrived at many millions of interim ends and organisms are still evolving. Evolution is directional, progressive and even predictable. He also talks about how homo sapiens think that they are more evolved than others, but actually all other species have gone through evolution too. They just have inherited different traits that helped them survive through natural selection. Dawkins claims that all species are equal. He uses backward chronology instead of forward chronology as a way of celebrating the unity of life. While going forward just extols diversity. In a backward chronology, the ancestors of any set of species must eventually meet at a particular geological moment. The last common ancestor is the one that they all share which he calls "Concestor". The oldest concestor is the grand ancestor of all surviving life forms on this planet. There is a single concestor of all surviving life forms and its evidence is that all that have ever been examined share the same genetic code and the genetic code is too complex to have been invented twice. There is no sign of other independent origins of life and if new ones arise, they would probably be eaten by bacteria. This book is a pilgrimage to discover human ancestors and as it progresses, it meets other pilgrims (organisms) who join humans in order as the book reaches the common ancestor that human share with them. Humans pass 40 rendezvous before hitting the origin of life itself. In each rendezvous, we find one particular ancestor, the concestor which has the same labeling number as the rendezvous.