The Ancestor's Tale : A Pilgrimage to the Dawn of Life (Abridged ed)

THE ANCESTOR'S TALE is a pilgrimage back through time; a journey on which we meet up with fellow pilgrims as we and they converge on our common ancestors.

Chimpanzees join us at about 6 million years in the past, gorillas at 7 million years, orang-utans at 14 million years, as we stride on together, a growing band.

The journey provides the setting for a collection of some 40 tales.

Each explores an aspect of evolutionary biology through the stories of characters met along the way or glimpsed from afar - the Elephant Bird's Tale, the Marsupial Mole's Tale, the Lungfish's Tale.

Together they give a deep understanding of the processes that have shaped life on Earth: convergent evolution, the isolation of populations, continental drift, the great extinctions.