Life May Have Begun in Hot, Dark Ocean Depths

Tiny formations discovered in Australian rock add new weight to the theory that life on Earth originated not in a “warm little pond,” as Darwin believed, but in scalding, volcano-heated ocean depths where sunlight never entered. The rocks contain what are believed to be fossils of single-celled organisms 3.2 billion years old.

“The cradle of life may have been a sulfurous, subterranean inferno, not unlike a medieval vision of hell,” paleobiologist Birger Rasmussen of the University of Western Australia reported in today’s Nature. The fossil-like traces are 600 million years younger than the earliest chemical evidence of life on Earth. But the find pushes back by 2.7 billion years the fossil evidence of microbes living around hot springs at the bottom of the sea. The formations appear to be threadlike organisms, measuring a thousandth of a millimeter in diameter and a tenth of a millimeter long, that would have gotten their energy from chemicals like sulfur, rather than sunlight, Rasmussen said.

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Compiled by Times medical writer Thomas H. Maugh II