By meticulously observing the traces left by living things upon the earth, men have now uncovered enough clues to create a broad stroke painting of the story of life. From a single seed found in the sea, the watery blanket of the planet, when the earth was still young, life has grown into a broad, majestic tree, with innumerable branches covering the oceans and the continents, even reaching to the sky. Men represent one of these branches, which grew increasingly distant from other forms of life as one age succeeded to another, but the signs of the successive branching of the tree can still be discerned as we contemplate the bodies of our distant cousins. The apes of our time are living windows offering us a vision of our closest ancestors, and so do the small rodents running through our fields, or the fish that leisurely swim through our lakes. Beholding the tree of life, man may see in it his origin, his past, giving him the tools to think about his future.The present book first represents an exploration of our bloodline, from the first seed of life until the emergence of our kind as a species, based on the knowledge offered to us by evolutionary biology, but disregarding the finest details and the technical language of the scientists to focus on the philosophical and spiritual implications of our evolution, its significance for our understanding of our own nature. The tree of life is here observed, from its roots to its trunk and the tip of its branches, but it also shows how large parts of the tree can be observed within our own bodies, as our flesh bears the traces left by numerous steps of our evolution. The tree of life is not only to be found around us but also within ourselves, and the reader will here be invited to reflect on the link between different milestones of our evolution and his experience of his own body, involving both his intellect and his senses, in the hope of leading him to a transformation of his perception of himself and to a mindfulness&nb