Search results
Results from the WOW.Com Content Network
The age of Earth is about 4.54 billion years; [7] [33] [34] the earliest undisputed evidence of life on Earth dates from at least 3.5 billion years ago according to the stromatolite record. [35] Some computer models suggest life began as early as 4.5 billion years ago.
The first known mass extinction was the Great Oxidation Event 2.4 billion years ago, which killed most of the planet's obligate anaerobes. Researchers have identified five other major extinction events in Earth's history, with estimated losses below: [11] End Ordovician: 440 million years ago, 86% of all species lost, including graptolites
The history of life on Earth traces the processes by which living and extinct organisms evolved, from the earliest emergence of life to the present day. Earth formed about 4.5 billion years ago (abbreviated as Ga, for gigaannum) and evidence suggests that life emerged prior to 3.7 Ga. [1] [2] [3] The similarities among all known present-day species indicate that they have diverged through the ...
[4] [5] Charles Darwin more famously proposed the theory of universal common descent through an evolutionary process in his book On the Origin of Species in 1859: "Therefore I should infer from analogy that probably all the organic beings which have ever lived on this earth have descended from some one primordial form, into which life was first ...
c. 4,300 Ma – Nectarian Era begins on Earth. c. 4,250 Ma – Earliest evidence for life, based on unusually high amounts of light isotopes of carbon, a common sign of life, found in Earth's oldest mineral deposits located in the Jack Hills of Western Australia. [4] c. 4,100 Ma – Early Imbrian Era begins on Earth.
A portal into early Earth. The Hadean Eon, from 4.5 billion to 4 billion years ago, is the earliest chapter in Earth’s history and a geological dark age that’s little understood because ...
[1] [2] [3] The earliest undisputed evidence of life on Earth dates from at least 3.5 billion years ago. [4] [5] [6] Evolution does not attempt to explain the origin of life (covered instead by abiogenesis), but it does explain how early lifeforms evolved into the complex ecosystem that we see today. [7]
This evidence, along with Barberton fossils, show that cellular life must have existed by this point in the evolution of Earth. There is work that potentially demonstrates life at 3.8 billion years ago, in what is now western Greenland, [4] [5] but it is highly debated. Cellular life existed 3.5 billion years ago and thus it evolved prior to ...