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The history of life on Earth traces the processes by which living and extinct organisms evolved, from the earliest emergence of life to the present day. Earth formed about 4.5 billion years ago (abbreviated as Ga, for gigaannum) and evidence suggests that life emerged prior to 3.7 Ga. [1] [2] [3] The similarities among all known present-day species indicate that they have diverged through the ...
If the deep marine hydrothermal setting was the site for the origin of life, then abiogenesis could have happened as early as 4.0-4.2 Gya. If life evolved in the ocean at depths of more than ten meters, it would have been shielded both from impacts and the then high levels of ultraviolet radiation from the sun.
Antonie van Leeuwenhoek. Traditional religion attributed the origin of life to deities who created the natural world. Spontaneous generation, the first naturalistic theory of abiogenesis, goes back to Aristotle and ancient Greek philosophy, and continued to have support in Western scholarship until the 19th century. [15]
The earliest evidence for life on Earth includes: 3.8 billion-year-old biogenic hematite in a banded iron formation of the Nuvvuagittuq Greenstone Belt in Canada; [30] graphite in 3.7 billion-year-old metasedimentary rocks in western Greenland; [31] and microbial mat fossils in 3.48 billion-year-old sandstone in Western Australia.
As for life on land, in 2019 scientists reported the discovery of a fossilized fungus, named Ourasphaira giraldae, in the Canadian Arctic, that may have grown on land a billion years ago, well before plants are thought to have been living on land. [99] [100] [101] The earliest life on land may have been bacteria 3.22 billion years ago. [102]
Questions about the origins of life and whether it exists on other planets have captivated countless scientists throughout history. Long-awaited answers may soon be provided by the world’s ...
Nickelback may be part of the reason we have life on Earth. Now, the researchers weren’t just super into late-90s Canadian hard rock—there’s a scientific reason behind the moniker.
A similar developmental origin suggests they are the same structure, and thus likely derived from a common ancestor. When a group of organisms share a homologous structure that is specialized to perform a variety of functions to adapt different environmental conditions and modes of life, it is called adaptive radiation.