How were the very first living beings born? The study in Nature that reveals the "mystery"
He is about to end up run over, his mother saves himIn very distant times, when human beings did not yet exist, the Earth was still populated by numerous living species. There are many scientific studies that have focused on these forms of life, but now there comes an answer to the question that everyone at least once in their life has asked ourselves: how were the very first animals born?
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The answer is in the rocks
The research in question was conducted at the Australian National University (ANU) and the results published in Nature. The head of the research team, Professor Jochen Brocks, explained that the starting point for obtaining an exhaustive answer were some sedimentary rocks found in central Australia. These rocks have been fractured or reduced to dust to extract molecules belonging to very ancient organisms. “It is the molecules that reveal the most interesting details about life on the planet 650 million years ago. It was the ecosystem revolution, with an exponential growth of algae ".
Record-breaking seaweed
In fact, prof. Brocks is not mistaken in speaking of "revolution": humans and many other living species would never have existed without one of the most profound ecological changes ever, triggered by the growth of seaweed.
But how did all this happen? About 50 million years earlier another event occurred, which is generally indicated by the expression “Snowball Earth”, Snowball Earth. The Earth completely froze from pole to pole, then when the ice melted, a huge amount of nutrients poured into the streams, all the way to the oceans. Nutrients along with milder temperatures created ideal conditions for algae to proliferate. A revolutionary event, which produced the transition from oceans populated by bacteria to a world where there is room for complex life forms.
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Thus the first complex life forms were born
"These organisms (algae, ed) are at the base of the food chain and provided enough energy to witness the concrete evolution of ecosystems, where larger and more complex animals - including humans - could be born and develop on our planet" , explained the same prof. Brocks.
This discovery derives from the analysis of rocks taken in Australia and dating back to that period, namely the one immediately following the melting of the "Snowball Earth". The rocks analyzed contained revolutionary fossils, symbolizing the advent of complex life on Earth, with more evolved life forms than previous bacteria. At the moment neither the triggering cause of all this nor the geological period of the transition is yet known with precision, nor have they been demonstrated any links with rising oxygen levels in the atmosphere. There are many hypotheses running around in the scientific world. However, we know that the glaciation to which the scientists refer is the one that took place 659-645 million years ago.
Anna Tita Gallo
