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What Was the First Life on Earth?


Claire.

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What Was the First Life on Earth?

The earliest evidence for life on Earth arises among the oldest rocks still preserved on the planet.

Earth is about 4.5 billion years old, but the oldest rocks still in existence date back to just 4 billion years ago. Not long after that rock record begins, tantalizing evidence of life emerges: A set of filament-like fossils from Australia, reported in the journal Astrobiology in 2013, may be the remains of a microbial mat that might have been extracting energy from sunlight some 3.5 billion years ago. Another contender for world's oldest life is a set of rocks in Greenland that may hold the fossils of 3.7-billion-year-old colonies of cyanobacteria, which form layered structures called stromatolites.

Some scientists have claimed to see evidence of life in 3.8-billion-year-old rocks from Akilia Island, Greenland. The researchers first reported in 1996 in the journal Nature that isotopes (forms of an element with different numbers of neutrons) in those rocks might indicate ancient metabolic activity by some mystery microbe. Those findings have been hotly debated ever since — as, in fact, have all claims of early life.

Read more: Live Science

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if the life is in 3.8 billion old rocks.  then life on earth is older than that right.  if you go by science.  it takes a while to fossilize.  it doesn't happen over night does it, or does it.

 

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45 minutes ago, danielost said:

  it doesn't happen over night does it, or does it.

 

 
 

Are you trying to play the Creationist card here ?

If a Fossil is found in a rock that is a million years old,all it means to me that regardless of how long the organism took to become a fossil;the rock is still a million years old.

Edited by A rather obscure Bassoon
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51 minutes ago, A rather obscure Bassoon said:

Are you trying to play the Creationist card here ?

If a Fossil is found in a rock that is a million years old,all it means to me that regardless of how long the organism took to become a fossil;the rock is still a million years old.

That would be essentially correct. The "3.8 billion years" indicates how old it is, not how long it took to fossilize.

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7 hours ago, A rather obscure Bassoon said:

Are you trying to play the Creationist card here ?

If a Fossil is found in a rock that is a million years old,all it means to me that regardless of how long the organism took to become a fossil;the rock is still a million years old.

i believe god created life yes.  but i wasn't playing that card,totally.

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It's interesting to me that we keep finding life that existed earlier and earlier in Earth's history. I like that life seems to have sprung up very rapidly after the Earth cooled down.

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