Perhaps life on Earth began 300 million years earlier.

Until this year, it was believed that life on planet Earth originated about 3.8 billion years ago. But science does not stand still, and thousands of researchers around the world continue to search for answers to numerous questions related to the emergence of the first living organisms on our planet. The results of one of these research shifted the birth date of life about 300 million years ago.

This unusual discovery was made in western Australia, where researchers discovered an unusual zircon crystal. The age of this stone was 4.4 billion years, which is 400 million years older than those crystals that scientists were able to detect earlier. Thus, the stone found the geological eon of the katharches, which began with the formation of the Earth and lasted about 600 million years.

In the study of the crystal inside it were detected blotches of graphite. Its very presence in the stone does not prove the existence of biological life forms at the time of the formation of a zircon crystal, however, thanks to graphite, scientists will be able to identify certain chemical signs that life was already in that period. The researchers managed to find fragments of intact graphite aged 4.1 billion years. Small carbon atoms, called isotopes, were found inside these fragments. These isotopes are consistent with the isotopic signatures of organic matter.

“Nowadays, if you look at such carbon, you immediately recognize its biogenic origin. However, in the case of Eon katharhea, things are not so straightforward, ”argues the geochemist of the University of California Elizabeth Bell.

In any case, the authors of the study compiled a list of non-biological processes that could somehow explain their finding, but they themselves believe that they were able to detect exactly the substance of biological origin. If they are right, then the Earth during its formation was a far more hospitable place for life than was previously thought to be, and the first life on our planet originated 4.1 billion years ago.

“We know that there was water. So nothing prevents us from accepting the fact that life already existed then, ”said microbiologist Mark van Zuilen of the Paris Institute of Physics of the Earth.

The article is based on materials https://hi-news.ru/research-development/vozmozhno-zhizn-na-zemle-zarodilas-na-300-millionov-let-ranshe.html.