Reprint Eastwood
Turns out we might be very wrong about the origin of life on Earth.
For decades now, the prevailing scientific theory explaining the Precambrian Avalon explosion — in short, the era dating back to about 685 to 800 million years ago in which multicellular organisms began to proliferate in Earth's oceans — has, put simply, been that an influx of oxygen into Earth's oceans accelerated the evolution of more complex life, ultimately paving the way for our planet's biosphere as we know it.
But as an international team of scientists suggests in a recently-published study, ancient rock samples show that this widely-accepted theory likely isn't true — meaning that we might just need to rewrite students' science textbooks.
"The fact that we now know, with a high degree of certainty, that oxygen didn't control the development of life on Earth provides us with an entirely new story about how life arose and what factors controlled this success," said Christian Bjerrum, an associate professor of geosciences and natural resource management at the University of Copenhagen and a co-author of the study published in the journal GeoBiology, in a statement.
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