An international team of researchers has unveiled new insights into Earth’s earliest ecosystem and came to a stunning result: life might have begun flourishing within a few hundred million years of the planet’s formation.
The study, published Friday in the journal Nature Ecology & Evolution, focuses on our Last Universal Common Ancestor (LUCA), the hypothetical common ancestor from which all modern cellular life descends.
This includes single-celled organisms such as bacteria all the way up through trees, shellfish, dinosaurs, and humans. LUCA is considered the root of the tree of life before it branches into Bacteria, Archaea, and Eukarya.
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