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including various kinds of fish with jaws, then fish without jaws, then … well, then our knowledge starts to fade into a kind of mist of uncertainty, for these very ancient times are where we start to run out of fossils.
    DNA tells us we are all cousins
    Although we may lack the fossils to tell us exactly what our very ancient ancestors looked like, we are in no doubt at all that all living creatures are our cousins, and cousins of each other. And we also know which modern animals are close cousins of each other (like humans and chimpanzees, or rats and mice), and which are distant cousins of each other (like humans and cuckoos, or mice and alligators). How do we know? By systematically comparing them. Nowadays, the most powerful evidence comes from comparing their DNA.
    DNA is the genetic information that all living creatures carry in each of their cells. The DNA is spelled out along massively coiled ‘tapes’ of data, called ‘chromosomes’. These chromosomes really are very like the kind of data tapes you’d feed into an old-fashioned computer, because the information they carry is
digital
and is strung along them in order. They consist of long strings of code ‘letters’, which you can read and count: each letter is either there or it isn’t – there are no half measures. That’s what makes it digital, and why we say DNA is ‘spelled out’.
    All genes, in every animal, plant and bacterium that has ever been looked at, are coded messages for how to build the creature, written in a standard alphabet. The alphabet has only four letters to choose from (as opposed to the 26 letters of the English alphabet). We write the DNA letters as A, T, C and G. The same genes occur in many different creatures, with a few revealing differences. For example, there’s a gene called FoxP2, which is shared by all mammals and lots more creatures besides. The gene is a string of more than 2,000 letters.
    You can tell that FoxP2 is the same gene in all mammals because the great majority of the code letters are the same. Not quite all the chimpanzee letters are the same as ours, and somewhat fewer of the mouse ones are. Of the total of 2,076 letters in FoxP2, the chimpanzee has nine letters different from ours, while the mouse has 139 letters different. And that pattern holds for other genes too. That explains why chimpanzees are very like us, while mice are less so.
    Chimpanzees are our close cousins, mice are our more distant cousins. ‘Distant cousins’ means that the most recent ancestor we share with them lived a long time ago. Monkeys are closer to us than mice but further from us than chimpanzees. Baboons and rhesus macaques are both monkeys, close cousins of each other, and with almost identical FoxP2 genes. They are exactly as distant from chimps as they are from us; and the number of DNA letters in FoxP2 that separate baboons from chimps is almost exactly the same (24) as the number of letters that separate baboons from us (23). It all fits.
    And, just to finish off this little thought, frogs are much more distant cousins of all mammals. All mammals have approximately the same number of letter differences from a frog (about 140), for the simple reason that they are all
exactly
equally close cousins: all mammals share a more recent ancestor with each other (about 180 million years ago) than they do with the frog (about 340 million years ago).
    But of course not all humans are the same as all other humans, and not all baboons are the same as all other baboons and not all mice are the same as all other mice. We could compare your genes with mine, letter by letter. And the result? We’d turn out to have even more letters in common than either of us does with a chimpanzee. But we’d still find some letters that are different. Not many, and there’s no particular reason to single out the FoxP2 gene. But if you counted up the number of letters all humans share in all our genes, it would be more than any of us shares with a