Animal life on Earth may be 1.5B years older than we thought: new research

Life on Earth looks good for its age.

Newly discovered fossil records hint that mold-like unicellular organisms — the common ancestor to all complex life on our planet — arrived over a billion years earlier than previous estimates.

Evidence was found deep in rock structures within Africa’s fossil-abundant nation of Gabon that suggest conditions for animal life started about 2.1 billion years ago, the BBC reported .

Going back 3.7 billion years, the very first traces of life consist of microbial bacteria lacking a nucleus, while it’s widely accepted that animal organisms began more recently at about 635 million years ago. The new findings challenge this theory, however.

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These primordial lifeforms, slimy, single-cell organisms that would “wiggle” to move and reproduce with spores, were unearthed in a landlocked water body, indicating the primordial lifeforms never spread globally. Nevertheless, their proliferation “set the stage” for the animal kingdom to evolve before they died out, the researchers wrote in a new report, published in the journal Precambrian Research .

Cardiff University’s professor Ernest Chi declared to BBC News, “We’re saying, look, there’s fossils here, there’s oxygen, it’s stimulated the appearance of the first complex living organisms.”

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“We see the same process as in the Cambrian period, 635 million years ago — it helps back that up. It helps us understand ultimately where we have all come from,” he added.

The chemistry of the rock in which the fossil was found points to a “laboratory” of life-producing elements. Chi believes that a continental collision and subsequent volcanic activity would have created the “nutrient-rich shallow marine inland sea” in which photosynthesis could kickstart oxygen production.

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“This would have provided sufficient energy to promote increases in body size and greater complex behavior observed in primitive, simple animal-like life forms such as those found in the fossils from this period,” he said.

However, some who are not involved with the research are skeptical.

“I’m not against the idea that there were higher nutrients 2.1 billion years ago but I’m not convinced that this could lead to diversification to form complex life,” said Professor Graham Shields of the University College London.

Other neutral parties give the idea more of a fighting chance.

A candidate at London’s Natural History Museum, Elias Rugen admitted the life-building elements “were all doing something a little bit unprecedented at this point in Earth’s history.”

“There’s nothing to say that complex biological life couldn’t have emerged and thrived as far back as 2 billion years ago.”

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