Earliest life made our life possible


Artist’s imagination of an assemblage of first primordial eukaryotic organisms of the ‘Protosterol Biota’ inhabiting a bacterial mat on the ocean floor. 

Genesis 1:2

The earth was formless and void, and darkness was over the surface of the deep, and the Spirit of God was hovering (creating life)  over the surface of the waters.

For a long time, scientists thought that complex life, or eukaryotic life, only appeared on Earth relatively recently. This was because there were few fossils of eukaryotic organisms found in rocks that were more than 800 million years old.

However, a recent study has found evidence of a group of organisms called protosterols in rocks that are 1,640 million years old. Protosterols are the building blocks of sterols, which are found in the membranes of eukaryotic cells. This suggests that eukaryotic life may have existed much earlier than previously thought.

The study also found that the number of protosterols in the rocks increased dramatically around 1,000 million years ago. This suggests that a major change in the environment, such as an increase in oxygen levels, may have led to the proliferation of eukaryotic organisms.

Genesis 1:12

The earth brought forth (oxygen producing) vegetation, plants yielding seed after their kind, and trees bearing fruit with seed in them, after their kind; and God saw that it was good.

The discovery of protosterols in ancient rocks is a significant finding that challenges our understanding of the history of life on Earth. It suggests that eukaryotic life may have been present for much longer (Gen 1:2) than we previously thought, and that it may have played a role in shaping the environment of our planet.

Article snippets 

Lost world of complex life and the late rise of the eukaryotic crown

Eukaryotic life appears to have flourished surprisingly late in the history of our planet. This view is based on the low diversity of diagnostic eukaryotic fossils in marine sediments of mid-Proterozoic age (around 1,600 to 800 million years ago) and an absence of steranes, the molecular fossils of eukaryotic membrane sterols1,2

This scarcity of eukaryotic remains is difficult to reconcile with molecular clocks that suggest that the last eukaryotic common ancestor (LECA) had already emerged between around 1,200 and more than 1,800 million years ago.

LECA, in turn, must have been preceded by stem-group eukaryotic forms by several hundred million years.

Here we report the discovery of abundant protosteroids in sedimentary rocks of mid-Proterozoic age.

These primordial compounds had previously remained unnoticed because their structures represent early intermediates of the modern sterol biosynthetic pathway, as predicted by Konrad Bloch.

The protosteroids reveal an ecologically prominent ‘protosterol biota’ that was widespread and abundant in aquatic environments from at least 1,640 to around 800 million years ago and that probably comprised ancient protosterol-producing bacteria and deep-branching stem-group eukaryotes.

Modern eukaryotes started to appear in the Tonian period (1,000 to 720 million years ago), fuelled by the proliferation of red algae (rhodophytes) by around 800 million years ago. This ‘Tonian transformation’ emerges as one of the most profound ecological turning points in the Earth’s history.

https://www.nature.com/articles/s41586-023-06170-w

So early life anticipated us. What are the odds of that!?


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