View source for The Ancestor's Tale

== The General Prolog ==
* The oldest genome on record is from a 700,000-year-old horse.
* The genetic code itself is virtually identical in all species and must have been the same in the shared ancestors.
* All vertebrates have a backbone and we assume that they inherited it from a remote ancestor which lived, the fossils suggest, more than half a billion years ago.
== 0 All Humankind ==