Researchers found LUCA, our earliest common ancestor, lived 4.2 billion years ago. It had a complex biology, affecting its environment.
  • xia@lemmy.sdf.orgEnglish
    2·
    1 day ago

    Makes you wonder if the first life form could live long enough to reproduce, or had to be functionally immortal.

  • ✺roguetrick✺@lemmy.worldEnglish
    8·
    1 day ago

    I really don’t understand the need to pin it down as one ancestor. Horizontal gene transfer would’ve been incredibly common(exacerbated by the viruses and low defense against them). Trying to play like there was one organism that collected all the features ignores the features just getting wholesale transplanted later.

    • Gina@lemmy.wtfEnglish
      4·
      1 day ago

      Continuously adding the Evolutions pile of evidence is a good thing

      • ✺roguetrick✺@lemmy.worldEnglish
        22·
        1 day ago

        I just think it’s a framing problem. In bacteria and archaea(particularly in the early periods) the genes themselves are what were impacted by natural selection and they would propegate between species based on the gene’s fitness alone. “Ancestor” is a bit of a misnomer and it’s very hard to ever say you’ve developed a timeline.