The Ancestor's Tale

Richard Dawkins, “The Ancestor’s Tale (A Pilgrimage to the Dawn of Evolution), Houghton Miffln, 2004, 623 Pages
I only read the first 150 pages of this book. It is a good book but became somewhat tedious for me as I am not a biologist. Dawkins gives us a comprehensive (perhaps too comprehensive) look at evolution going back through four billion years of life on our planet seeking the first progenitor. This is only the 2nd book this year that I started and did not finish. It happens. However, I am preserving some of my notes I did get from this book.

My Notes:
Pg. 7: As things stand, it appears that all known life forms can be traced to a single ancestor which lived more than 3 billion years ago. If there were other, independent origins of life, they have left no descendants that we have discovered. And if new ones arose now they would swiftly be eaten, probably by bacteria.

Pg. 8: The first step in this 40 step journey to find the original progenitor is at 5 million years ago. It is at this point that we separated from the chimpanzee. In all we will pass only about 40 rendezvous points before we hit the origin of life itself.

Pg. 20: We don’t need fossils to peer back into history. Because DNA changes very slowly through the generations, history is woven into the fabric of modern animals and plants, and inscribed in its coded characters.

Pg. 27: About 10,000 years ago, all human populations were hunter-gatherers. Soon, probably none will be.

Pg. 35: Archaeology suggests that something very special began to happen to our species around 40,000 years ago. Anatomically, we remained much the same but, if you look at their culture before and after this point, there is a huge difference. Some have called this The Great Leap Forward. Before 40,000 years ago, there appear to be no paintings, no carvings, no figurines, no grave goods, no ornamentation. After the Leap, all these things suddenly appear, together with musical instruments and the Lascaux Cave murals created by Cro-Magnon people.

Pg. 64: It is still debated as to whether or not we descended from Neanderthrals. There is no doubt that Homo sapiens sapiens and Nenderthals overlapped for a long time in Europe, and there was surely contact between them. We have found that Neanderthal mitochondria are quite distinct from those of all surviving humans, suggesting that Neanderthals are no closer to Europeans than to any other modern peoples. It may be that to find a common ancestor between us and them would require us to go back 500,000 years or more.

Pg. 71: In 1984 the Turkana Boy was discovered. At 1.5 million years it is the oldest near-complete hominid skeleton ever found. Lucy is even older, but less complete.

Pg. 83: We do not have the heaviest brains of all living things. We have the heaviest brains for our size of all living things. Given our size versus our brain weight plotted on a logarithmic scale on a scatter diagram, our brain is 6 times larger than the regression line would predict.