No, I haven't read it. I haven't even heard of it. But now that you've mentioned it I'll have to see if I can come across a copy and give it a good long read. Thanks!
Dawkin's literary trick is to start at the beginning and meet all our ancestors on the way forward. That allows him to show the evolutionary path to us (not as an inevitable one, but the one that happened). And interestingly, he can leave out the paths that did not happen to lead to us. The dinosaurs and birds are not in his tale...
A few people I have discussed this with said it clarified their thinking, and that realizing that not all paths lead to humans.
Extinction of some paths is a reality that few people understand properly.
And as a complete aside, I was just reading that recent studies show that we homo sapiens came darn close to extinction ourselves in our rather short history. Down to about 10-20,000 150kya and perhaps as few as 2,000 individual humans after the Toba supervolcano eruption 70kya.
As a result, humans from Siberia and South Africa are more related to each other than some chimps living close together in Central Africa. Amazing...
