Learn more about the top theories about how life began on Earth, and how it may not have started from scratch.

Living organisms share an ancestor called the last universal common ancestor, or LUCA. LUCA is estimated to have lived ...

Ancient duplicated genes are giving scientists their first real clues about what life was like before all life on Earth ...

"By following universal paralogs," says Kaçar, "we can connect the earliest steps of life on Earth to the tools of modern ...

Life’s story may stretch further back than scientists once thought. Some genes found in nearly every organism today were already duplicated before all life shared a common ancestor. By tracking these ...

Scientists have uncovered the earliest chemical evidence of life on Earth, in a discovery that could revolutionise our understanding of how ancient molecules evolved. As part of a groundbreaking study ...

New method reveals chemical signs of early microbial life in ancient Earth rocks, showing photosynthesis evolved much earlier than believed.

Life on Earth may have learned to breathe oxygen long before oxygen filled the skies. MIT researchers traced a key oxygen-processing enzyme back hundreds of millions of years before the Great ...

Deep in some of Earth’s oldest rocks, traces of ancient life still linger, even when every cell has crumbled. You would not see shells, bones, or clear microfossils in these rocks. Instead, you would ...

How did life begin on Earth? While scientists have theories, they don’t yet fully understand the precise chemical steps that led to biology or when the first primitive life forms appeared. But what if ...