Looks like life’s been around on planet Earth a lot longer than we thought:
Scientists probing a newly exposed, formerly snow-covered outcropping in Greenland claim they have discovered the oldest fossils ever seen, the remnants of microbial mats that lived 3.7 billion years ago.
It’s a stunning announcement in a scientific field that is always contentious. But if confirmed, this would push the established fossil record more than 200 million years deeper into the Earth’s early history, and provide support for the view that life appeared very soon after the Earth formed and may be commonplace throughout the universe.
Not sure how that conclusion is supported by the discovery, but then cultural Marxism always argues in favor of the non-specialness of human life. Not that, so far, life has been found anywhere else.
Say, Washington Post, what about global warming?
A team of Australian geologists announced their discovery in a paper titled “Rapid emergence of life shown by discovery of 3,700-million-year-old microbial structures,” published Wednesday in Nature.
They made their find in July 2012 while doing field research in Isua, a region ofGreenland so remote that they had to travel there by helicopter. The site is known for having some of the oldest rocks on Earth, in what is known as the Isua supracrustal belt. Allen Nutman, a University of Wollongong geologistwho has studied the rocks there since 1980, said one day he and his colleagues were working at the site when they spied some outcroppings they’d never seen before. The formations had been exposed where the snow pack had melted — the result, Nutman said, of the global warming that is so pronounced in Greenland or of low levels of snowfall the previous winter.
Thanks!
Claims about evidence for ancient life have invariably been controversial. The multiple lines of evidence for the Greenland stromatolites “are not as clear cut as you’d ideally want for such an extraordinary claim,” cautioned Abigail Allwood, a geologist at the NASA Jet Propulsion Laboratory who has studied fossil stromatolites.
“They might really be biological but it’s hard to absolutely refute the possibility that they formed by localized mineral precipitation from seawater. If we found these on Mars, would we plant a flag and declare that we had found life on Mars? I think not, but we would definitely get very excited and continue looking around for more information,” she said.
“We expect there will be some robust debate. That’s what science is all about.”
Except, of course, when it comes to “global warming” or “climate change.” But, hey… you can’t make fossils without breaking a few skulls. Meanwhile, in other proof of living fossilization:
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