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The aim of this article is to apply an Aristotelian strategy to the question of the nature of an early embryo. Aristotle argues that the decisive point in ontology is to identify that which makes a portion of matter be a thing that belongs to a certain class or species. Today we know that what explains why a group of cells is a human embryo is its genome. Since an adult has the same genome he or she had as an embryo, it follows that an adult is identical to the embryo he or she originally was. This claim of transtemporal identity can withstand various objections, especially the one derived from the possibility of twinning.