You are here.

One pulse of light in the dark. Begin to scroll, and a thread will grow out behind you — backward, through everything that made you.

Homo sapiens

This is your tip on the tree — a single living branch among your warm-blooded kin. They drift around you now, every one a cousin sharing a recent grandparent.

present day · 0 years ago

Two lines become one.

Descending, your branch and the chimpanzee's flow together and fuse. This is the rule of the descent: to go down is to watch ancestors merge. Every fork you pass is a reunion.

last common ancestor with Pan · ~7 million years ago

A small, warm thing in the dark.

Your ancestor here is no larger than a shrew — nocturnal, quick, listening. It hides among ferns while dinosaurs move overhead. The void warms; the dust thickens around you.

early mammals · Mesozoic · ~200 million years ago

Life crawls out of the sea.

The most consequential step in the upper half of your story. A fleshy-finned creature drags itself onto a muddy shore and breathes air. Sky above, water behind — and the whole future of land waiting.

first tetrapods · Carboniferous · ~340 million years ago

Latimeria

Below the surface again, where the light filters down in cold blue shafts. Your lineage runs through the lobe-finned fish — the lungless, the deep-dwelling, the almost-unchanged. The spectrum cools toward indigo.

lobe-finned fish · Devonian · ~400 million years ago

The branches dissolve into cells.

Go back far enough and there is no body at all — only a loose, drifting colony learning to stay together. The clean lines of descent come apart into a cloud of single cells, each one your ancestor.

first animals · Tonian · ~800 million years ago

One cell swallows another — and keeps it alive.

A larger cell engulfs a small bacterium. It is not digested. It stays, and it powers its host, and the two never part again. That captive became the mitochondrion.

you still carry its descendant in every cell of your body

Everything alive returns to a single point.

Every branch that remains — every animal, plant, fungus, and microbe — flows inward and converges here. The same cyan dot you began as, but now it is the ancestor, not you. The circle closes.

LUCA · the last universal common ancestor · ~3.8 billion years ago

From so simple a beginning — endless forms.

Now the whole tree unfurls from that single root: every kingdom fanned out into the full spectrum of life. Find yourself again — one glowing tip on the rim, exactly where you started.