Complex life a billion years earlier than thought?
May 17, 2016
Organic fragments extracted from the host rock of the Gaoyuzhuang macroscopic fossils showing well-preserved cellular structure. Credit: Maoyan Zhu.
Researchers said Tuesday they had uncovered fossils showing that complex life on Earth began more than 1.5 billion years ago, nearly a billion years earlier than previously thought.
But the evidence, published in Nature Communications, immediately provoked debate, with some scientists hailing it as rock solid, and others saying they were wholly unconvinced.
After first emerging from the primordial soup, life remained primitive and unicellular for billions of years, but some of those cells eventually congregated like clones in a colony.
Scientists even took to calling the later part of this period the "boring billion", because evolution seemed to have stalled.
Read more at: http://phys.org/news/2016-05-complex-life-billion-years-earlier.html#jCp
May 17, 2016
Organic fragments extracted from the host rock of the Gaoyuzhuang macroscopic fossils showing well-preserved cellular structure. Credit: Maoyan Zhu.
Researchers said Tuesday they had uncovered fossils showing that complex life on Earth began more than 1.5 billion years ago, nearly a billion years earlier than previously thought.
But the evidence, published in Nature Communications, immediately provoked debate, with some scientists hailing it as rock solid, and others saying they were wholly unconvinced.
After first emerging from the primordial soup, life remained primitive and unicellular for billions of years, but some of those cells eventually congregated like clones in a colony.
Scientists even took to calling the later part of this period the "boring billion", because evolution seemed to have stalled.
Read more at: http://phys.org/news/2016-05-complex-life-billion-years-earlier.html#jCp