The Gospel of LUCA: In Search of the Ancestry of the Animal World

The book «The Gospel of LUCA» tells about the animal world and the human race. Only LUCA (Last Universal Common Ancestor) — not an apostle, but our common ancestor, and in order to understand what this being is, the reader, together with the author of the book, biologist Maxim Vinarski, will embark on a journey spanning over 4 billion years. They will learn about the history of the origin and evolution of multicellular animals. They will discover that we, humans, are just one of many branches of the great Tree of Life, and that the species Homo sapiens formed according to the laws common to the evolution of all living things. They will understand how biologists determine the relationships between animals and reconstruct the paths of their evolution. They will learn about the lives and scientific discoveries of the scientists — those who came up with the idea of evolutionary relationships among all organisms on Earth and figured out how this relationship can be determined.