They can force to reconsider the very date of the appearance of the first living organisms
A group of Australian researchers led by Allen Nutman from the University of Wollongong discovered traces of the oldest living creatures on the planet in Greenland. According to scientists, their find allows us to assert that life on our planet originated more than 3.7 billion years ago, that is, much earlier than previously thought.
Until now, it was assumed that the first organisms on Earth formed in the so-called "primordial soup" about 3.4 billion years ago - in any case, there was no sufficiently convincing evidence that living things inhabited the planet much earlier for a long time. However, several years ago, scientists began to find the first evidence that speaks in favor of the fact that life on Earth is older than it seems.
For some time, the attention of scientists was attracted by graphite from the Isua Formation in Greenland, which appeared 3.7 billion years ago, and in 2013, specialists from Japan were able to obtain the first evidence that living things "participated" in the formation of this graphite - this was evidenced by the characteristic share carbon isotopes in them.
In the course of a new study, Australian scientists, according to them, managed to obtain even more convincing evidence that in the distant past, the territory of the modern Isua formation was inhabited by microorganisms. We are talking about traces of their activity, found in stromatolites - fossil rocks that were initially formed in non-water areas of the reservoir (in this case, according to scientists, this was the primary broth). It is assumed that the "basis" for the formation of such rocks was the waste products and the remains of ancient bacteria. Although organic compounds in the composition of the stones studied by scientists have not been preserved, in their composition they differ from the surrounding rocks, and researchers are inclined to attribute this difference precisely to the effect of ancient microorganisms.
Although the new evidence is to some extent circumstantial and in the scientific community, in all likelihood, there will be scientists who will be skeptical about it, the scientific work following the study was published in the highly prestigious scientific journal Nature.
Dmitry Erusalimsky