The start of complex life on Earth pushed back by 750M years
Complex life on Earth originated 750 million years earlier than thought, discovered in Australia. Dr. Erica Barlow found a 2.4 billion-year-old microfossil, linking it to the 'Great Oxidation Event.' This finding reveals insights into early life evolution.
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Complex life on Earth has been discovered to have originated 750 million years earlier than previously believed, thanks to a chance discovery in remote Australia. Dr. Erica Barlow from the University of New South Wales found a unique microfossil in a black chert rock, dating back approximately 2.4 billion years. This finding coincides with the 'Great Oxidation Event,' a crucial period in Earth's history marked by a significant rise in oxygen levels. The discovery provides direct evidence linking environmental changes during this event to the evolution of complex life forms. The sudden increase in oxygen, termed the 'Oxygen Catastrophe,' had a profound impact on early life forms that thrived in low-oxygen environments. This groundbreaking research sheds light on the development of life on Earth and the impact of environmental changes on its evolution.
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6 commentsCivilization has been pushed back too with stuff like Gobekli Tepe. If I had to make a bet I'd say there's probably a lot of far older stuff out there, some of which might not be discovered due to destruction during the end of the last ice age or simply having been built in temperate climates instead of desert or near-desert. Agriculture and permanent settlement and systems of governance were probably discovered multiple times in multiple places.
It's a trend in space too with better and better telescopes. The further we look, the more we see.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hubble_Deep_Field
https://www.nasa.gov/image-article/nasas-webb-delivers-deepe...
Webb sees galaxies earlier than they should be, and more of them than it should see.
The universe is huge in both time and space, much larger than we would have imagined even 50-100 years ago.
It's biiiiiiiiig maaaaaaan... bubble bubble...
If you google for "francevillian biota" or "stirling biota" you'll find some freely-available PDFs describing what might be multi-cellular life's fossils in africa and australia.
There's also https://www.nature.com/articles/ncomms11500 "Decimetre-scale multicellular eukaryotes from the 1.56-billion-year-old Gaoyuzhuang Formation in North China"
I'm kind of hoping that paleontologists decide there was multi-cellular life on earth which got wiped out by the Snowball Earth Marinoan and Sturtian global glaciations.
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