Wow that was awesome to read. Biology keeps blowing its old theories out of the water. All of the excitement about rapid genome sequencing is being borne out, even tho you don’t read about bioinformatics so much. So bacteria are an offshoot from our lineage. We really are learning a lot so quickly.
I believe that we were well-organized colonies of bacteria was proven long time ago.
We are literally a unified collective of cells.