Oldest Fossil Ever Found Discovered in Greenland

(AP)

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.

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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.

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.”

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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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