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The 3.48 Ga Dresser formation hosts microfossils of prokaryotic filaments in silica veins, the earliest fossil evidence of life on Earth, [70] but their origins may be volcanic. [ 71 ] 3.465-billion-year-old Australian Apex chert rocks may once have contained microorganisms , [ 72 ] [ 5 ] although the validity of these findings has been contested.
Before Homo sapiens, Homo erectus had already spread throughout Africa and non-Arctic Eurasia by about one million years ago. The oldest known evidence for anatomically modern humans (as of 2017) are fossils found at Jebel Irhoud, Morocco, dated about 360,000 years old.
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.
The structures are considered to be one of the oldest ecosystems on Earth, according to NASA, representing the earliest fossil evidence for life on our planet from at least 3½ billion years ago.
Life on Earth may have begun even earlier than biologists suspected, at a time when the solar system was still in its infancy. Earth's oldest fossils yet discovered, give hope for life on Mars ...
The human fossils found in the layers of sediment were originally difficult to date. ... This pushed back the estimated age of the oldest pieces, extending it to between 68,000 and 86,000 years ...
Stromatolites are a major constituent of the fossil record of the first forms of life on Earth. [24] They peaked about 1.25 billion years ago (Ga) [22] and subsequently declined in abundance and diversity, [25] so that by the start of the Cambrian they had fallen to 20% of their peak.
The history of paleontology traces the history of the effort to understand the history of life on Earth by studying the fossil record left behind by living organisms. Since it is concerned with understanding living organisms of the past, paleontology can be considered to be a field of biology, but its historical development has been closely tied to geology and the effort to understand the ...