The Ancestor's Tales

The Ancestor's Tale : A Pilgrimage to the Dawn of Evolution

There are other literary allusions, of course, and I almost made Bunyan my model and Pilgrim's Regress my title. But it was to Chaucer's Canterbury Tales that I and my research assistant Yan Wong kept returning in our discussions, and it seemed increasingly natural to think of Chaucer throughout this book.

The Ancestor's Tale by Richard Dawkins, on setting out on a pilgrimage to the one-cell ancestor, precursor to all life on Earth. Unlike The Canterbury Tales, we will not start the journey with all the creatures together. Instead, we first follow the evolutionary line, ready to meet at the crossroads our nearest primates, the bonobos and chimps, before continuing our journey, meeting reptiles, amphibians, along the way, of which each will tell its own evolutionary story. If they could set it in poetry, that would be a magnificent story.

I bought Robert Fagle's Translation of The Canterbury Tales, but haven't gotten around to reading it. The rhyming can get tiring, and I would rather be able to read it in Middle English.