Luca, Earth's Early Aeon, Similar to Bacteria

This is a news story, published by Guardian, that relates primarily to Anderson news.

Anderson news

For more Anderson news, you can click here:

more Anderson news

biology news

For more biology news, you can click here:

more biology news

Guardian news

For more news from Guardian, you can click here:

more news from Guardian

About the Otherweb

Otherweb, Inc is a public benefit corporation, dedicated to improving the quality of news people consume. We are non-partisan, junk-free, and ad-free. We use artificial intelligence (AI) to remove junk from your news feed, and allow you to select the best science news, business news, entertainment news, and much more. If you like biology news, you might also like this article about

such ancient ancestral organisms

. We are dedicated to bringing you the highest-quality news, junk-free and ad-free, about your favorite topics. Please come every day to read the latest earliest ancestor news, last universal common ancestor news, biology news, and other high-quality news about any topic that interests you. We are working hard to create the best news aggregator on the web, and to put you in control of your news feed - whether you choose to read the latest news through our website, our news app, or our daily newsletter - all free!

ancient organism

Guardian

•

Science

Luca is the progenitor of all life on Earth. But its genesis has implications far beyond our planet

Summary

Nutrition label

79% Informative

Luca short for the last universal common ancestor, the progenitor of all known life on Earth seems to have been born 4.2bn years ago .

Back then our planet was no Eden but something of a hell on Earth : a seething mass of volcanoes pummelled by giant meteorites.

Analysis shows Luca had all the machinery the protein enzymes it needed to feed itself from simple molecules in its surroundings, specifically carbon dioxide and hydrogen.

It could have gleaned them from so-called hydrothermal vents in the deep sea, where volcanic heat sends hot water within fissures in the rock streaming out of chimney-like geological formations.

Astronomical searches for planets around other stars have suggested that Earth -like planets are not all that uncommon.

But there might have been special features of our planet, Anderson cautions, that made it particularly amenable to life.

He believes Gaia-style maintenance of a biosphere should be quite common, once it has started.

VR Score

Informative language

Neutral language

Article tone

informal

Language

English

Language complexity

Offensive language