Put another way, what kind of cell picked up mitochondria? The standard textbook view is that it was quite a sophisticated cell, something like an amoeba, a predator that could crawl around, change shape and engulf other cells by a process known as phagocytosis. In other words, mitochondria were acquired by a cell that was not so far from being a fully fledged, card-carrying eukaryote. We now know that’s wrong. Over the last few years, comparisons of large numbers of genes in more representative samples of species have come to the unequivocal conclusion that the host cell was in fact an
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