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

by Richard Dawkins

In the Chimpanzee’s Tale we argued that the average divergence between human and chimpanzee genes traces back further than we once thought, to 10 million years ago or more. Yet at the start of this chapter we quoted a date for Rendezvous 1 of between 5 and 7 million years ago. This apparent contradiction is straightforward to explain. We have already seen that gene copies within a single interbreeding population (in fact even within your own body) can coalesce millions of years into the past. When a species splits into two, the genes in each population will carry with them a pre-existing history. That means splits between genes can predate splits between species by millions of years.