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A story holds that she was tired when she created "the rich and the noble", so all others, or "cord-made people", were created from her "dragg[ing] a string through mud". [ 6 ] In the Huainanzi , there is a description of a great battle between deities that broke the pillars supporting Heaven and caused great devastation.
Primordial soup, also known as prebiotic soup, is the hypothetical set of conditions present on the Earth around 3.7 to 4.0 billion years ago. It is an aspect of the heterotrophic theory (also known as the Oparin–Haldane hypothesis) concerning the origin of life, first proposed by Alexander Oparin in 1924, and J. B. S. Haldane in 1929.
The first eon in Earth's history, the Hadean, begins with the Earth's formation and is followed by the Archean eon at 3.8 Ga. [2]: 145 The oldest rocks found on Earth date to about 4.0 Ga, and the oldest detrital zircon crystals in rocks to about 4.4 Ga, [34] [35] [36] soon after the formation of the Earth's crust and the Earth itself.
The PAH world hypothesis is a speculative hypothesis that proposes that polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbons (PAHs), known to be abundant in the universe, [1] [2] [3] including in comets, [4] and assumed to be abundant in the primordial soup of the early Earth, played a major role in the origin of life by mediating the synthesis of RNA molecules, leading into the RNA world.
Organic molecules on the early Earth could have had either terrestrial origins, with organic molecule synthesis driven by impact shocks or by other energy sources, such as ultraviolet light, redox coupling, or electrical discharges; or extraterrestrial origins (pseudo-panspermia), with organic molecules formed in interstellar dust clouds ...
The earliest evidence for life on Earth includes: 3.8 billion-year-old biogenic hematite in a banded iron formation of the Nuvvuagittuq Greenstone Belt in Canada; [30] graphite in 3.7 billion-year-old metasedimentary rocks in western Greenland; [31] and microbial mat fossils in 3.48 billion-year-old sandstone in Western Australia. [32] [33 ...
Additionally, the oxidation state of Earth's mantle was likely different at early times, which changes the fluxes of chemical species delivered to the atmosphere from volcanic outgassing. [9] Environmental factors from elsewhere in the solar system also affected prebiotic Earth. The Sun was ~30% dimmer overall around the time the Earth formed. [5]
Earth formed approximately 4.6 billion years ago from a disk of dust and gas orbiting the newly formed Sun. It formed via accretion, where planetesimals and other smaller rocky bodies collided and stuck, gradually growing into a planet. This process generated an enormous amount of heat, which caused early Earth to melt completely.