Vice by Becky Ferreira 4/13/2022
Scientists present more evidence for the oldest known fossils on Earth, which could bolster the search for alien life.
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. Such a finding would have major implications for understanding the emergence of life on Earth, and could also inform the search for aliens on other worlds.
These presumed microbial fossils were originally collected by Dominic Papineau, an associate professor in geochemistry and astrobiology at University College London, during a 2008 expedition to Québec’s Nuvvuagittuq Supracrustal Belt, a formation that contains some of the oldest rocks on Earth. Papineau and his colleagues reported their discovery in a 2017 paper published in Nature, which sparked a debate over whether the tubes and filaments preserved in the rocks were a result of biological or geological processes.
In the years since then, Papineau and his colleagues have worked to bolster the case that the tantalizing structures are indeed early lifeforms that may have thrived near hydrothermal vents in Earth’s ancient oceans. The researchers report these “unprecedented” new findings, which potentially reveal “a diverse microbial ecosystem on the primordial Earth that may be common on other planetary bodies, including Mars,” in a study published on Wednesday in Science Advances.
More:
https://www.vice.com/en/article/7kb399/discovery-dramatically-rewrites-history-of-life-on-earth-scientists-say
