The earliest signs of life on a young Earth, around 3.5 billion years ago, have generally come from the ocean in the form of fossilized microbes within ancient rock. Now, scientists working in the Barberton Greenstone Belt in South Africa—where some of the oldest rocks on Earth are preserved—find evidence of terrestrial microbial life that they estimate is about 3.22 billion years old. The results, published today (July 23) in Nature Geosciences, represent the oldest signs of land-based life on our planet yet discovered
“This work represents the oldest and least ambiguous work that we have so far that life existed on land already 3.2 billion years ago,” Kurt Konhauser, a professor of earth and atmospheric sciences at the University of Alberta in Canada who was also not involved in the work, writes in an email to The Scientist.
Researchers have found more fossil evidence of the earliest microbial life ...
