|
Descent of Man In this lecture, beginners can familiarize themselves with basic information and terms used to describe the evolution of humanity beginning with the origin of primates through the comings and goings of Genus Homo. |
Life's leap to land
Posted: Thursday, November 30, 2000
Life made the transition to land more than a billion years earlier than previously thought, according to new geological evidence.
Organic material discovered within South African rocks suggests that microbes made the leap from the oceans to land about 2.6 billion years ago. Until now, 1.2 billion-year-old fossils of blue-green algae found in Arizona contained the earliest record of terrestrial life. The discovery gives scientists new information about the presence of life-sustaining oxygen in the Earth's atmosphere. An ozone shield and an oxygen rich atmosphere around the planet would have been needed for life on land to emerge. The rocks come from what is now the Eastern Transvaal district of South Africa. They contain fossilised remnants of mats of photosynthetic bacteria, organisms that generate oxygen from water and atmospheric carbon dioxide.
"This places the development of terrestrial biomass more than 1.4 billion years earlier than previously reported," said Yumiko Watanabe, of the Pennsylvania State University, US, in the scientific journal Nature. More
Send page by E-Mail
