Historically experts have theorized that complex life began on our planet around 635 million years ago, as the first organisms evolved in the primordial ooze. However, experts now say that new evidence challenges that timeline and that complex life could have begun more than a billion years before that.
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00:00Historically, experts have theorized that complex life began on our planet around 635
00:09million years ago, as those organisms evolved from the primordial ooze.
00:13However, experts now say that new evidence challenges that timeline, and that complex
00:17life could have begun more than a billion years before that.
00:21Researchers say they have uncovered signs of new fossils in the sedimentary marine rocks
00:24off the west coast of Africa.
00:26These are those macro-fossils discovered in the Franceville Basin.
00:30They have used advanced dating techniques to divine that they were created some 2.1
00:34billion years ago, meaning these signs of life predate our previous oldest by around
00:391.5 billion years.
00:41They add this means there was likely another increase in marine phosphorus and seawater
00:45oxygen before the one which occurred 635 million years ago.
00:49The researchers posit that underwater volcanoes may have cut off parts of the ocean, creating
00:53shallow nutrient-rich subsections of ocean.
00:56They say this points to a much more complex history of life formation on Earth than previously
01:01believed, adding that the complexity of these fossils points to an evolutionary leap in
01:05organism diversity, one you wouldn't find otherwise.