Beginning two billion years of Earth’s history, the amount of oxygen was not sufficient, but the atmosphere was rich in ...

The Purple Earth Hypothesis has significant implications for the search for life on other planets.

An MIT study suggests some early life forms may have evolved the ability to use oxygen hundreds of millions of years before ...

Add Yahoo as a preferred source to see more of our stories on Google. All life on Earth can be traced back to a Last Universal Common Ancestor, or LUCA. A study suggests that this organism likely ...

The question of when life began on Earth is as old as human culture. “It’s one of these fundamental human questions: When did life appear on Earth?” said Professor Martin Whitehouse of the Swedish ...

By resurrecting a 3.2-billion-year-old enzyme and studying it inside living microbes, researchers at the University of ...

Parts of ancient Earth may have formed continents and recycled crust through subduction far earlier than previously thought.

Introduction : The coherence of history / Stephen Jay Gould -- The planetary setting of prebiotic evolution / Sherwood Chang -- Early environments : constraints and opportunities for early evolution / ...

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 ...

Forbes contributors publish independent expert analyses and insights. I write about biodiversity and the hidden quirks of the natural world. We’ve pieced together a remarkably detailed timeline of ...

The discovery of catalytic RNA transformed our understanding of life's beginnings. Clare Sansom explores how the RNA world ...