SoylentNews

ElizabethGreene [soylentnews.org] writes:

From Becky Ferreira at Vice:

Scientists believe they have identified the oldest fossils on Earth, dating back at least 3.75 billion years and possibly even 4.2 billion years, in rocks found at a remote location in northern Québec, Canada, according to a new study.

If the structures in these rocks are biological in origin, it would push the timeline of life on our planet back by 300 million years at a minimum, and could potentially show that the earliest known organisms are barely younger than Earth itself.

Vice Article: https://www.vice.com/en/article/7kb399/discovery-dramatically-rewrites-history-of-life-on-earth-scientists-say [vice.com]

TFP:
Metabolically diverse primordial microbial communities in Earth’s oldest seafloor-hydrothermal jasper
https://www.science.org/doi/10.1126/sciadv.abm2296 [science.org] (open access)

Original Submission