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

Till now many theories have come forward regarding when life started on Earth but no solid evidence has been found. Now researchers have presented a new discovery which suggests that life had appeared on Earth only 4.2 billion years ago. Scientists have discovered the last universal ancestor, or Last Universal Common Ancestor (LUCA), based on the genomes of present-day organisms. This ancestor would have come into existence 4.2 billion years ago.

According to this, life on Earth had arrived in the initial phase of this planet itself. Because the time of Earth’s coming into existence is said to be 4.5 billion years ago. Science Alert This study has been published in. Biologist Sandra Álvarez-Carretero associated with this discovery Tell They had no idea that LUCA would be so old, and would have come into existence only a few hundreds of years after the formation of the Earth.

If we talk about the time of creation, the Earth’s environment must have been completely different at that time. If compared with today’s time, it would have been very poisonous. Oxygen, which is the most essential element for almost every living organism on Earth today, would have become available on Earth much later. This time is said to be 3 billion years ago. That means life on Earth had arrived long before oxygen.

Fossils of even the smallest 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 only 4.3 billion years ago. But it has also been said that Earth’s geological and biological processes present an immense challenge in exploring life so anciently. That means gathering evidence of life at that time is almost impossible.

Here the team of scientists took the help of new resources which are called genomes of living organisms. Also fossil records have also been searched 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 without a nucleus, and would have relied on non-oxygen-based metabolic processes to produce acetate.