An artist’s impression of Earth in the Archaean Eon, 3.8 billion to 2.5 billion years ago
CHRISTIAN JEGOU/SCIENCE PHOTO LIBRARY
Mysterious microbes living in wetlands in China have helped to narrow down when the ancestor of all animals and plants lived – and the oxygenation of Earth’s atmosphere may have played a key role in its emergence.
The new data brings us a step closer to understanding “an event which happened billions of years ago”, says Burak Avcı at Aarhus University in Denmark.
This event was…
