Living organisms share an ancestor called the last universal common ancestor, or LUCA. LUCA is estimated to have lived ...

"By following universal paralogs," says Kaçar, "we can connect the earliest steps of life on Earth to the tools of modern ...

Life’s story may stretch further back than scientists once thought. Some genes found in nearly every organism today were already duplicated before all life shared a common ancestor. By tracking these ...

Ancient duplicated genes are giving scientists their first real clues about what life was like before all life on Earth ...

New method reveals chemical signs of early microbial life in ancient Earth rocks, showing photosynthesis evolved much earlier than believed.

Scientists have uncovered the earliest chemical evidence of life on Earth, in a discovery that could revolutionise our understanding of how ancient molecules evolved. As part of a groundbreaking study ...

Every organism alive on Earth, from oak trees to octopuses to the bacteria in our gut, belongs to a single extended family. Genetic evidence points back to one ancestral cell, a last common forebear ...

How did life begin on Earth? While scientists have theories, they don't yet fully understand the precise chemical steps that led to biology, or when the first primitive life forms appeared. But what ...

Deep in some of Earth’s oldest rocks, traces of ancient life still linger, even when every cell has crumbled. You would not see shells, bones, or clear microfossils in these rocks. Instead, you would ...

Ancient enzymes show life’s nitrogen signal stayed unchanged for billions of years, helping scientists read early Earth.

Beginning two billion years of Earth’s history, the amount of oxygen was not sufficient, but rich in carbon dioxide and ...