I've spent some time on this resource and it is pretty amazing and alarmingly eye opening

An idea struck me to explore it with you guys. For today's post I'd just like to show you how truly extensive it is by seeing if I can find humans and point out how insignificant we are in the grand scheme of things. I like doing that to humans.

Above is the tree in its entirety, starting at the earliest point in the evolutionary tree, 2.1 billion years ago. Presumably, life existed long before that according to numerous sources but nothing has been catalogued as such.

If you don't want to go through this little trip with me, skip to the bottom for a short video clip tl;dr summary

Clicking on the first circle, we see Archaea and Eukaryotes, a combined collection of over 2 million species:

Archaea

These are single celled micro-organisms, and pretty difficult to classify. This is because they're small to start with, but they also typically get described based only on the nucleic acids sampled in their surrounding environments.

Archaea are prokaryotes, which lack cell nuclei and are distinct though visually similar to bacteria. You can find some pretty interesting and distinct archaea though, such as this Haloquadratum walsby, which is where Bill Gates presumably stole his logo from:

Eukaryotes

Unlike Archaea, this group do have cell nuclei and are thus not limited to such small sizes (we can go into this in greater depth in later posts if needed). This potential for multi-cellular life brings us everything we typically think of as life, from dogs to bees, wasps to wolves, hornets to hyenas.

_{Also plants, fungi, and so on but whatever}

This is where all life branches off, but we have to find humans so we need to go via the Eukaryotes route:

_{Feeling insignificant yet?}

As we zoom in, things still seem to look kind of unfamiliar, but there's a tree-type thing! Plants! Now we're getting somewhere. Over to the left spiral here, we see animals. lets go:

Ok... it's actually 'animals and more' but fine, we're on the right track:

Clicking on animals, we see there's a hefty 1.3 million species in the database so far. But where to go from here? To the left is a whole tree in itself of sponges. I didn't come here to wash the dishes so let's continue to the right.

Trichoplax... platyctenida...jellyfish...bilaterally symmetrical animals... Humans are symmetrical! Let's keep digging...

Nephrozoa... protostomes... ectysozoa... penis worms?? Where the hell am i??

I think we've gone off course, let's go back to this *Nephrozoa, that had a picture of a bird which is kinda like a human. 1.3 million species from this branch alone:

But we've found something! bony vertebrates. That sounds very human indeed. Sure enough, deep within this branch, mammals

Things are starting to look very familiar indeed. But which way from here? Therian mammals? Sure... Placental mammals? Well, our women do have placentas so that seems right... Boreoeutheria or atlantogenata?? Urrrrr let's go with atlantis since it has sloths in it. They're pretty human-like (if you think about it on a whole tree perspective).

...No, no that just leads to elephants and aardvarks. Let's go back to Boreoeutheriia then.

PRIMATES! Almost there!

Well this pretty much explains itself now. At the primate level, there are only 373 described species. Not much more to get wrong at this point:

We're apes so I'm gonna continue spinning round the tree here up to old world monkeys and apes, and then great apes. And this is our final stop, right?

squints... what's that, there in the corner? Is that...a human?

It is indeed. There we are guys. All of humanity on a tiny little leaf, not even a pixel when looking at the whole tree on a computer screen. Right next to us we have the Bonobo and Chimp, by far our closest relatives.

What a journey!! Here it is, summed up, in case your perspectives got lost as mine did:

So there you have it, all our knowledge, arrogance, religion and science. Not just on a pale blue dot, but on a little green leaf.

Thanks for stopping by!