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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 ...
[2] [3] Estimates on the number of Earth's current species range from 10 million to 14 million, [4] with about 1.2 million or 14% documented, the rest not yet described. [5] However, a 2016 report estimates an additional 1 trillion microbial species, with only 0.001% described. [6]
Life: A Natural History of the First Four Billion Years of Life on Earth is a book about natural history by British paleontologist Richard A. Fortey. It was originally published in hardcover in Great Britain by HarperCollins Publishers, under the title Life: An Unauthorised Biography. Fortey used this book to explain how life has evolved over ...
Starting in 1985, researchers proposed that life arose at hydrothermal vents, [235] [236] that spontaneous chemistry in the Earth's crust driven by rock–water interactions at disequilibrium thermodynamically underpinned life's origin [237] [238] and that the founding lineages of the archaea and bacteria were H 2-dependent autotrophs that used ...
Eukaryogenesis, the process which created the eukaryotic cell and lineage, is a milestone in the evolution of life, since eukaryotes include all complex cells and almost all multicellular organisms. The process is widely agreed to have involved symbiogenesis , in which an archaeon and a bacterium came together to create the first eukaryotic ...
For decades, scientists have theorized that volcanic lightning on an early Earth played a crucial role in kickstarting life on the planet by breaking molecules into useful, biological components.
All life on Earth can be traced back to a Last Universal Common Ancestor, or LUCA. A new study suggests that this organism likely lived on Earth only 400 million years after its formation.
From its earliest appearance at about 1.9 Ma, H. erectus is distributed in East Africa and Southwest Asia (Homo georgicus). H. erectus is the first known species to develop control of fire, by about 1.5 Ma. H. erectus later migrates throughout Eurasia, reaching Southeast Asia by 0.7 Ma. It is described in a number of subspecies. [38]