Evolutionary divergent ERVs insertion shapes host transcriptome during preimplantation development.RNA-seq analysis showed that ZGA in hamster occurs at the two-cell stage, similar to that in mice. Furthermore, interspecies comparisons of human, hamster, and mouse early embryonic transcriptomes revealed that ZGA genes and their expression dynamics are highly species-specific. Furthermore, evolutionarily young hamster-specific ERV1 and ERVK factors are enriched near the hamster ZGA locus, and these ERVs provide species specificity, suggesting that this may drive ZGA and control the expression of endogenous genes.