UCLA researchers believe they've discovered evidence that there was life on Earth hundreds of millions of years before previous benchmarks.
The stunning announcement this week means that life could have developed 4.1 billion years ago, beating previous estimates by as many as 300 million years, according to research by UCLA geochemists published in the journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.
"Twenty years ago, this would have been heretical," said Mark Harrison, co-author of the research and a professor of geochemistry. "Finding evidence of life 3.8 billion years ago was shocking."
What does this mean for humanity?
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