Groundbreaking New Study Finds Life On Earth Emerged 4.2 Billion Years Ago
NDTV
Earth itself is approximately 4.5 billion years old, indicating life originated when the planet was still in its infancy.
Researchers have made a groundbreaking discovery, tracing the origins of life on Earth back to a single ancestor that emerged approximately 4.2 billion years ago. Scientists pinpointed the emergence of the last universal common ancestor (LUCA) by analysing the genomes of present-day organisms, Science Alert reported. To put this in perspective, Earth itself is approximately 4.5 billion years old, indicating life originated when the planet was still in its infancy.
"We did not expect LUCA to be so old, within just hundreds of millions of years of Earth formation. However, our results fit with modern views on the habitability of early Earth,'' said evolutionary biologist Sandra Álvarez-Carretero of the University of Bristol in the UK.
In its early stages, Earth possessed a vastly different atmosphere, one that would be considered highly toxic by today's standards. The emergence of oxygen, crucial for current life forms, occurred relatively late in the planet's evolutionary timeline, possibly as recent as 3 billion years ago.
