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Last Universal Common Ancestor
August 1 , 2024
114 days
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- Researchers are tracing the origins of life on Earth back to a single ancestor that emerged approximately 4.2 billion years ago.
- Scientists have pinpointed the emergence of the last universal common ancestor (LUCA) by analysing the genomes of present-day organisms.
- Earth itself is approximately 4.5 billion years old, indicating life originated when the planet was still in its infancy.
- The emergence of oxygen occurred relatively late in the planet's evolutionary timeline, possibly as recent as 3 billion years ago.
- Evidence in the form of microbial fossils dates back 3.48 billion years.
- LUCA was a complex organism, not too different from modern prokaryotes.
- But it possessed an early immune system, showing that even by 4.2 billion years ago.
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