The oldest fossils ever found are “direct evidence” of life on Earth 3.8 to 4.3 billion years ago when our planet was still in its infancy, researchers reported Wednesday.
Even at the lower end of the spectrum, “the microfossils we discovered are about 300 million years older” than any runners-up, said Dominic Papineau, a professor at University College London who made the discovery.
The dating puts the fossils “within a few hundred million years of the accretion of the solar system,” he said in a video statement.
“If life happened so quickly on Earth, then could we expect it to be a simple process that could start on other planets?”, asked lead author Matthew Dodd, a graduate student at the London Centre for Nanotechnology.
“We could expect to find evidence for past life on Mars four billion years ago,” Dodd said.
It may also be true, he added, that Earth was “just a special case.”
The tiny fossils — half the width of a human hair and up to half-a-millimetre in length — take the form of blood-red tubes and filaments formed by ocean-dwelling bacteria that fed on iron.
“One of the big questions when it comes to early life studies is whether or not the organic carbon we find in these rocks is actually biological in origin,” explained Dodd.
Several other research institutions contributed to the new study, including the Geological Survey of Norway, the US Geological Survey, and the University of Ottawa.
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