ONE TINY BUBBLE

An introduction to LUCA, the “squishy blob” that sits at the end of the deepest root of the family tree that includes every living thing.

What with falling meteorites, erupting volcanoes, and violent weather, the Earth of over 3 billion years ago was, Krossing writes with considerable understatement, an “unfriendly world”—but it was then that our Last Universal Common Ancestor “formed from / the dust of exploded stars.” It had no legs, arms, eyes, mouth, or stomach, but because it would divide, grow, and change to develop all those and more, it connects us to all the “mushrooms and moss, / fir trees and ferns, / bacteria and bedbugs, / sea stars and sharks, / lizards and lions” on our planet. Lo gives this narrative a cozy, intimate feeling with a quick progression of broadly brushed scenes featuring figures from an amorphous glob with a few indistinct organelles inside through the appearance of low green plants and orange dinosaurs to a final view of a family of brown-skinned human campers smiling up at swirling northern lights and stars. Indeed, the author and the illustrator suggest at the end, the miracle that is us could well be repeated on another world. Readers after a fuller account of evolution might pair this with the likes of Lisa Westberg Peters’ Our Family Tree (2003), illustrated by Lauren Stringer; those wondering how scientists deduced LUCA’s existence and nature will find details in an afterword in a smaller type and a source list at the end. (This book was reviewed digitally.)

A simple, matter-of-fact reminder that we are all connected.