Groundbreaking New Study Finds Life on Earth Emerged 4.2 Billion Years Ago

Many theories have been put forward about when life began on earth, but no concrete evidence was found. Now researchers have presented a new discovery which states that life had come on earth 4.2 billion years ago. Scientists have found out about the last universal ancestor, or Last Universal Common Ancestor (LUCA) on the basis of the genomes of present-day organisms. This ancestor must have come into existence 4.2 billion years ago.

According to this, life on earth had come in the initial phase of this planet. Because the time of existence of earth is said to be 4.5 billion years ago. Science Alert This study has been published in the Journal of the American Journal of Biology. Biologist Sandra Álvarez-Carretero, associated with this discovery, said Tell is that they did not anticipate LUCA to be so old, and to have come into existence only a few hundred million years after the Earth’s formation.

If we talk about the time of formation, the atmosphere of the earth would have been completely different at that time. If we compare it with today’s time, it would have been very poisonous. Oxygen, which is the most important element for almost every living organism on earth at present, its availability on earth would have come much later. This time is said to be 3 billion years ago. That means life had come on earth much before oxygen.

Fossils of even the tiniest of organisms are said to be 3.8 billion years old. But scientists here believe that the environment necessary to support life on Earth was created 4.3 billion years ago. But it has also been said that the geological and biological processes of the Earth pose an immense challenge to explore life from such an old period. That is, gathering evidence of life at that time is almost impossible.

Here the team of scientists took the help of new resources called genomes of living organisms. Along with this, fossil records have also been explored for this. Scientists have tried to understand how LUCA would have survived in the environment of that time. It would have been a single-celled organism which would not have even had a nucleus, and it would have been dependent on non-oxygen based metabolic processes to make acetate.