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Science

The Oldest Known Life Keeps Getting Older 67

Posted by timothy from the theories-and-evidence dept.
Porfiry writes: "Remnants of organic matter in ancient soil more than 2.6 billion years old may be the earliest known evidence for terrestrial life, according to a team of Penn State astrobiologists. 'Our work shows that the organic matter in this soil very probably represents remnants of microbial mats that developed on the soil surface between 2.6 and 2.7 billion years ago,' says Dr. Hiroshi Ohmoto, professor of geochemistry and director of The Penn State Astrobiology Center. 'This places the development of terrestrial biomass more than 1.4 billion years earlier than previously reported.'"
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The Oldest Known Life Keeps Getting Older More

The Oldest Known Life Keeps Getting Older

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  • Re:Reward $250,000 (us) (Score:1)

    by Anonymous Coward
    for balance here is a link that disputes the Paluxy river tracks: http://www.talkorigins.org/faqs/paluxy.html

  • Re:I can't belive this! (Score:1)

    by Anonymous Coward
    Awww... somebody beat me to the yo' mamma stuff.
    Oh, well. Yo' mamma's so old that she did Jesus and the twelve apostles.

    Heh, heh...
  • In related news, my grandmother keeps getting older.

    This is all very cool but this point in the article got me wondering:

    "Evidence that microorganisms flourished in the oceans since at least 3.8 billion years ago exists, but when these microorganisms colonized on land is not clear. The oldest undisputed remnants of terrestrial biomass have been 1.2 billion-year-old microfossils found in Arizona."

    Does this mean there's even older stuff IN the ocean? I always thought we've spent far few too little of our resources searching all the unexplorer ocean on the planet.

    We've been to other planets via NASA, yet a vast majority of our own planet remains unexplored - the ocean.
  • and it includes Adam and Eve in the same way the king james version does. The king james translation may not be the best, and there are plenty of biblical hebrew words whose meanings are disputed, but the Adam and Eve story is the same.

    That being said, I have to believe that your teacher was on crack. Or maybe acid.

  • why so many people can't accept that evolution and discovery of really old organisms do not exclude each other. The bible says the earth and everything on it was created in 6 days...yet it is describing a time period BEFORE THE SUN AND EARTH EVEN EXISTED, so "day" does not necessarily mean "the earth spinning around once on its axis". One "day" during that time could have been a billion years.

  • Creationism, as it was written in Genesis, is revealed in very simple terms and anthropomorphizes God so the simpletons of many thousand years ago could comprehend it. Could you tell a shepard of 500 B.C. about how amino acid chains are formed? Could you explain to him time on a "geologic scale" and have him comprehend that kind of time span? Can you describe a non-physical being accurately with physical terms? No... The best that could be done was a very simple approach to give people the foundation or sequence of events that would eventually lead to man's creation.

    The ideas you describe are millinea newer then genesis. Genesis is a myth in the truest sense of the word. The story was made up as an explanation of things people didn't understand. Even the catholics teach this. (I should know, I went to a catholic high school)

    Now, if you want to debate the ability of creationism and other theories to coexist, that is another story entirely. Without disagreeing with you, I'd like to point out a few things though: First, if there is a god that does not interfere with the progression of events and is simply an observer, then how did the idea that he/she/it exists in the first place come to exist in the minds of humans? When the idea was planted, how come it was in such a way that no particularly large percentage of the population believes the same thing? And finally and most importantly, where did the idea that such a being needs to be worshiped come from?

  • We usually think of evolution as a slow accretion of traits that's almost imperceptibly slow.

    There is one school of thought that holds that evolution is pretty static for long periods of time, then explodes in response to suddenly changing environmental conditions (atmospheric oxygen, climatary changes, comet impacts, humans, etc.). Mass extinctions are extreme examples of this, but it also occurs on smaller scales more frequently. This sounds much more plausible to me and explains why we sometimes find in the fossil record evidence of pretty drastic evolution from one species to another in a relatively short period of time with no record of intermediate species.
  • Carbon 14 has a half-life of only 1200 years or so, so it's completely useless for things this old.

    One of the more common dating techniques for really old stuff is potassium-argon dating. It's less sensitive to initial conditions, and tells you how long ago the rock was formed as a solid. Potassium-40 decays to Argon-40, and you can determine both how much argon is trapped in the rock, and how much K40 is still there. The argon all escapes until the rock is solid.

    There are some interesting ideas coming from some Christians who try to look at both the physical evidence and the Bible. Glenn Morton is one of the more interesting. He accepts the "mainstream" accepted ages of the Earth and fossils. His hypothesis is that Adam and Eve were probably either homo habilis, or perhaps even australopithicus, and that "Noah's Flood" was the flooding of the Mediterranean basin about 2 million years ago. (Not a global flood, but a pretty huge one that there is good evidence for.)

    This one, in principle, could even be testable. If it's true, you might be able to find ruins of cities on the bottom of the Mediterranean. Or, perhaps, fossil evidence that genus Homo originated down there.

    In either case, though, this 2.6 billion year old stuff is a thousand times older than any of that.
  • Of course carbon dating is wrong in this case-- it's half life is way to short to be relevant to 2.6 billion year old critters.

    Creationists are mighty bitter about being upset after a few short millenium of stability, as a quick search for carbon dating on google revealed...
  • That's nothing. Why just the other day I sped the entire universe up (except myself) to very near the speed of light. I'm technically 85 trillion years old. (Of course, I don't feel a day over 21.58

  • Man, these guys should come check out my bathroom. They'd probably have a field day in there. I can't be sure, but I think that creeping puddle of green sludge crawling from under my toilet into my bathtub might be an indigenous remnant of those microbial mats that developed on the surface of clay-rich soil during the rainy season, too.

    I'd even let them clean away all of my precious biomass if they wanted to.

    For a price.

  • Now, I'm certainly no expert, but I bet older stuff can be found under Strom Thurmonds fingernails.

    Then again, didn't he change gods diapers?


    Mike Thacker
  • Sure makes my upcoming 30th birthday seem trivial:)

  • Sure... The Youngest Known Life Keeps Getting Younger
  • These events, as they are described in Genesis, are actually correct if we look at them in a simple way. The intent was to show a forward progression in that the earth was created then water then man. etc...

    So why are the sun and moon created on the 4th day after grass, trees, etc. Genesis in not a simple explanation it is an incorrect explanation. It would be easy to rewrite Genesis to put things in their correct order and make it simpler.

    For instance how is day and night existing before the sun is created simple to understand?

  • Apparently.
    And I thought I would make a difference somehow.
  • When travelling through old places, I've always felt a certain eeriness. I'm not talking about your grandmother's little cottage or the turn-of-the-(19th)-century state capitol, but the ancient places that reek of age. I had a chance to visit some archeological sites in Florida and Georgia. It's *eerie* looking at a fragment of bone or some shard and realizing that someone long ago existed, perhaps had similar questions about their existence, and eventually died.
    So they find evidence that life is a lot older than we first believed... Did DNA spring magically from some primordial ooze when lightning added the spark of *life*? Did DNA hitch a ride on a meteor or comet from a departure gate in another star system? Did That-Which-Is-Nameless breathe upon the waters and spark this madness?
    Gods. 2.6 billion years. Though I daily work with exponential quantities, the reality of 2.6 BILLION years boggles my mind. How powerful must its life spark be if it could survive for 2.6 billion years.
    Hmmm. I wondered if it would taste like truffles if I ate it. And would it give me super powers?
  • 2.6-2.7 bya isn't all *that* long ago

    Compared to WHAT?!? Even if there was life in the oceans a billion years earlier, this is still more than two thirds the age of that. That's pretty old. Hell, the universe is only, what, 20-30 billion years old? This is 10% of the age of the UNIVERSE. That's pretty damn long ago, no matter what the metric.

  • The oldest lifeform on Earth has got to be that green, rotting thing in my refridgerator.
  • . . . I knew there was a reason they keep hiking my tuition more than the cost of living increase each and every year.
  • First, I am a Christian. Second I have a brain and I do try to use it.

    How can anyone state with certainty that something is between 2.6 and 2.7 BILLION years old. I understand carbon dating in general, but you have to make assumptions that conditions that affect the carbon decay are the same as they are now and I do not see how you can just assume that and report these numbers like they are fact. We do not know what conditions were like 20,000 years ago yet alone 2.6 billion years ago.

    I would not say that carbon dating is wrong, but would say that it cannot be proven to be correct about the past (beyond X number of years) because we do not have evidence to show that the conditions that would make it accurate about the past exists.

  • Actually, the Torah is just the first five books of the Bible (Genesis, Exodus, Leviticus, Numbers and Deuteronomy). The King James Bible has a reasonable translation of the Torah into English. As with any translation from one language into another, there are points where you could debate that the translation would be better with a different word or phrase, but the overall translation is good.

    As far as the exact, original source(s) of the material, I'm sure you could take entire courses covering various alternative theories.
  • I don't usually complain about bizarre moderation, but could some intelligent person please fix what this moderator did? To be called on-topic would be a stretch of the imagination, and it's most definately something that has been covered (far more intelligently) in the past. Slashdotters should be rather embarrassed that a pointless troll was labeled as 'interesting' by one of their peers. (And he's got to be laughing about the fact that somehow that post earned him karma.)
  • I hadn't seen a reference to that PNAS paper (I only get Science and Nature :) -- I'll have to check that out.

    In reply to your question: my favorite pet speculation is that essentially all of the prebiotic evolution and the fundamentals of the biotic evolution of life (including what you might call the "formal" origin-of-life) occurred somewhere other than on a planet.

    There's plenty of evidence that amino acids are created in interstellar molecular clouds (IMCs -- we routinely detect them there with spectrographs, and more complex molecules are being found all the time); the basic reason is that the IMCs are rich in the chemical species necessary, are cold enough and well-enough shielded from UV that the fragile compounds are stable for long enough for the chemistry to develop (and this is accretional chemistry, BTW -- and it takes a long time!), and full of interstellar dust and icy grains which provide excellent surfaces for the chemistry to proceed upon. And after all the prebiotic stuff happens, over billions of years in IMCs, the IMCs condense into new stellar systems, complete with plenty of warmer protoplanetary bodies -- like comets and asteroids -- within which there are great opportunities and lots of substrates for life to develop on, without all of the nasty disadvantages to planetary surfaces. These substrates, BTW, include clay minerals -- the Tagish Lake meteorite [sciencemag.org] is a great example of that -- and plenty of organics, including amino acids in quantity. And the temperatures are still low enough that the fragile molecules survive for long periods.

    Then the planetary bodies (including appropriate satellites) get seeded by the life-bearing bodies -- which have recently been shown [sciencemag.org] to be gentle enough to avoid killing any life aboard -- and the life promptly takes over the new environment. After the planets have calmed down [sciencemag.org], the life actually survives, to eventually become us...

    Not quite original (props to Fred Hoyle, among others), but the general scheme answers many of the tough questions about life's origin on planetary bodies.

    And I think this would be a great topic for a /. story -- just to get more comments. Any ideas there, yardgnome?

    ---

  • Thanks for the reference -- I'll look that up.

    Is it possible to detect which aa's are present and in which proportions?

    Glycine is the only one I remember, for sure... but I just did a search on Google for "interstellar molecular cloud amino acid spectra" and got about a hundred hits, the first several of which were annotated bibliographies on the subject of ET life origin. You might want to check the same?

    Also, have nucleic acids been detected in these clouds?

    I'm sure they haven't -- the spectra of complex organics is very complex itself, and there are arguments about the spectra of much simpler compounds (remember, there's a complex mix of molecular species, at very low temperatures, and plenty of stuff between us and them to filter and obfuscate the results). AFAIK, nucleic acids haven't been found in meteorites, either -- but plenty of amino acids have been; upwards of 50 the last time I checked. (Some reports of chirality selection [sciencemag.org], too -- and speculation [sciencemag.org] that it might be from circularly-polarized light in the IMC.)

    What do you say, tesserae....want to submit it?

    This topic's gonna be dead soon -- email [mailto] me and I'll be happy to discuss it more.

    ---

  • The homochirality article is

    Cronin, John R., Pizzarello, Sandra
    Enantiomeric Excesses in Meteoritic Amino Acids
    Science 1997 275: 951-955

    The proposed reason is

    Bailey, Jeremy, Chrysostomou, Antonio, Hough, J. H., Gledhill, T. M., McCall, Alan, Clark, Stuart, Ménard, François, Tamura, Motohide
    Circular Polarization in Star- Formation Regions: Implications for Biomolecular Homochirality
    Science 1998 281: 672-674

    IIRC, there are several papers on L-amino acid excesses; I saw them in the search results from Google, but didn't write them down. The above paper I stumbled across during another search on Science, though, so I had it handy...

    My email link from the previous post should work for a while, although this account is going to expire at the end of the year... just in case this topic gets archived soon.

    ---

  • From reading the article, it appears that they hypothesize the mats were formed by cyanobacteria based on carbon isotope ratios. However these ratios change over time as C-13 and C-14 decay. I would think that presence of nitrogen and/or phosphorus residues would be a much more definitive indication that the carbon layer is organic in origin.

    OTOH, the article perhaps exagerates the findings & claims of the study. I wish they provided primary references of some sort!
  • Strom Thurmond is approximately 3.2 billion
    years old, easily beating any primoridal
    ooze or mats.
  • While you say that religion can act as a positive (as a security blanket) I think you have missed the "real" intention of any religion: control. Religions (all of them) were invented by people that wanted control of others. Read any religious text and they all have one thing in common: the honor your parents/gaurdians/government/religious leaders part. Religion is as damaging to human rights as any other "ideal" in existence. The truly sad part is that religious apologists will go out of their way to "prove" that they are right by pointing to their propoganda and saying it is the word of "god" (in whatever manifestation they are worshipping him/her/it). When confronted with reality, religious people tend to get a little psycho-spastic and just completely lose it if questioned in a rational way. That's how I was thrown out of church by the time I was twelve. I asked too many questions and was told that religion is not to be questioned. If I couldn't just accept that it was the truth, then I was to avoid sullying the religious teachings by stepping foot in the church. I was told this by my pastor at the time. Gotta love that wonderful warm reception you get at church;-).

  • I've often wondered about this possibility. Perhaps we are just decendants of some simple life form from another planet. Now, maybe, just maybe there was an intelligent race that sent out "seed meteorites" or something with very, very simple life forms from their own planet/solar system/whatever and this was a form of "seedship". Instead of sending out complicated life forms that required very, very specific living conditions, they instead sent out massive quantities of very, very simple life that could live within a wide variety of conditions. Once this simple life was "revived" by our relatively warm and wet planet, it slowly evolved into the life that we see all around us.

    The "others" goal in all of this may simply have been to ensure that whatever happened to them, life, in some form, would continue. And eventually this life would grow to maturity somewhere, somehow, and begin asking some of the same questions they had asked. Perhaps this was a last ditch effort before their planet was destroyed by some cosmological catastrophe. Or perhaps the simple life arrived without anyone "guiding" it in any way, but a life rich planet was destroyed and remains of it made their way to earth.

    OK, sorry, early morning philosophy is causing me to overthink.

  • I never claimed otherwise. Are you?
  • if there were terrestrial microbial communities, there was almost certainly an ozone layer (to protect them from the otherwise-deadly UV radiation), and an ozone layer can only develop if there's a significant amount of free oxygen in the atmosphere.

    The rapid development of early life just amazes me. Only a few hundred million years after Heavy Bombardment, there's evidence of prevelant bacterial life in the oceans. Meaning that as soon as life could move to the oceans, it evolved to completely fill the niche. While that life may seem relatively simple now, it's an incredible leap forward from assembly of organic molecules.

    Now that researchers are starting to push back the date of life on land (and this research pushes it pretty far back), those organisms living in the oceans must have evolved oxygenic photosynthesis (a rather complicated metabolic pathway) relatively early in their evolutionary history.

    Coupled with the recent research related to modern salmon evolution in response to pressure we're putting on them, think of what this means for the pace of evolution! We usually think of evolution as a slow accretion of traits that's almost imperceptibly slow. But now it appears that early bacteria evolved an entirely new metabolic pathway within a relatively short period of time.

    Given, it might seem a little weird to be thinking of millions of years as a "short" period of time, but just think about what humans were doing millions of years ago. And look at what sort of behaviors we've evolved since then.
    (just a little discussion-hook to get any non-scientists interested again).
  • Now hold on a second. You're misinterpreting me here. My point wasn't that 2.7bya was some piddling little number. My point was that the earliest known complex life is a billion years older than what the (misleading) headline claimed was the oldest known life.
  • Actually, they're not talking about C13 dating. Instead, they're referring to C12/C13 ratios. Enzymes preferentially use lighter isotopes over heavier ones, and thus organisms end up taking in and carrying around a lot more C12 than C13.
    Therefore, wherever an organism has died (as long as it had enzymes), you'll find a higher ratio of C12:C13 than you'd normally expect. Since these aren't radioactive isotopes, they don't decay, and you can use them to check for life loooong ago.

    That's one of the major pieces of evidence allowing the 3.8 billion-year old stromatolites (see an earlier post of mine) to be assigned biological origins: much higher C12:C13 ratios than anything surrounding them.

    Summary-- the main difference between C12:C13 and C13-dating is that C12:C13 can only be used to find out if something was biologically formed, while C-13 can be used to find out how old something biological was.
  • Reading the article again, I assumed that they used C12:C13 to determine biological origin (it's pretty standard). Instead, they used reduced carbon analysis, something that I'm not familiar with. It looks like they used the C12:C13 data to prove that it was from land rather than ocean. I'd be interested to know exactly how they did that, though...

    Oh well. I guess my little science-spiel was informative, but not totally geared towards the findings.
  • Sorry to switch gears a little, but you reminded me of a question that I'm hoping others will have thoughts on. In relatively recent history there was a school of thought that traced the origin of life to clay templates. For a while people scoffed, but then the idea started to catch on. But lately there's been some nay-saying, because people haven't found any examples of inorganics acting as templates for organics, and the clay mineral theory suggested that the phenomenon may still be occurring.

    Quick segue into prions. These are really weird diseases of the brain that people were starting to think were replicating proteins (flying in the face of the Central Dogma of Biology). Now, in the June issue of Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (USA), it was found that prions are still infectious after exposure to 600 degrees C. No organic molecule can withstand that, so the researchers speculated this might be an example of an inorganic template for biological replication (no clues yet as to what it could be).

    SO, what do you guys think about the possibility of an inorganic origin of organic life? We've obviously got some people that have done some origin-of-life research (or at least thought about the question), and I'm interested to hear everyone's opinion. All the above was just background, not to be considered any sort of answer to the question.
  • PNAS Paper:
    Brown, Rau, Johnson, Bacote, Gibbs, and Gajdusck. New studies on the heat resistance of hamster-adapted scrapie agent: Threshold survival after ashing at 600 degree C suggests an inorganic template of replication. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, USA. 97: 3418-3421.

    I had heard of chemistry paralleling theoretical prebiotic chem occurring in interstellar clouds, but had never heard of actual amino acids occuring within them...whoah. Is it possible to detect which aa's are present and in which proportions?

    Also, have nucleic acids been detected in these clouds? If they're shielded from UV and other ionizing radioations, it could theoretically be possible. But if they haven't been detected, that would suggest a sort of switcharoo evolution of biotic informational chemistry. ie - amino acid chains carrying information, then a switch to RNA carrying info, then a switch to DNA carrying info while amino acid chains start doing all the diry work.

    The idea of seeding has always intrigued me, and I think it would be great for a /. story. There are all sorts of questions to be asked/commented on. Of course, we'd have to limit the discussion quite a bit. Possibly narrow things down to the actual origin of life (what starts accretion in the clouds, for example) as opposed to the origin of life on earth. If we try that, though, we don't have much evidence to go on. So maybe switch things around to what form life might have been in when thrust onto earth? Just throwing out some ideas.

    It would be great to have a lot of people commenting on this. I know there are some exosci's out there, and any organic or biochemists could no doubt lend expertise on the feasibility of synthesis of certain compounds via accretion.

    What do you say, tesserae....want to submit it?
  • Hopefully you get this question before the topic is buried. I, sadly, don't have a personal subscription to Science. Do you have the reference to that chirality selection article?

  • I'm certain that we had samples of the world's oldest mold in our old flat. There was just something about that place that cried out for fresh basalt and searing radiation!

    Seriously though, it's nice that despite our best efforts so far, life will go on. What I'd be curious about is if they find evidence of life between the ocean development and land development. It would be interesting to find out if the lifeform changed significantly, or if this was an indication of some change to the atmosphere of the planet allowing for said changes.

    If so, then life is constant, everything else is fleeting...

    Still, it's nice to know that there's a good chance that the mold we didn't kill in the bathroom will still survive...

  • Ah, the great paradox that is the sorceress Magelin.

    (oh, you mean The Sword in the Stone wasn't real...blah)

  • This just in!

    In a recent article headline found on one of the most popular news sites on the net, it has been confirmed. Time does in fact continue to go on... despite Bush being elected president.

    (sorry...just had to do it)

  • Evolution is just a theory. Scientists can show its effects in the lab, by say breeding fruit flies, but can't show that fruit flies themselves originally originated that way. All they have is indirect evidence.

    Gravity is also just a theory. Scientists can show its effects in the lab, by say dropping things, but can't show that that is the same force that holds the solar system together. All they have is indirect evidence.

    Indeed there is good evidence the solar system is geocentric - for instance, the unrealistically small parallaxes on stars. Noone has yet to succesfully explain those away.

    The theory of evolution developed, historically, by looking at real-world data. The idea that it could have gained popular acceptance while false is absurd; noone wanted it to be true!

  • Inorganic- becomes organic- evolves until it attempts to produce inorganic life (AI-- HAL anyone?). Hmm, maybe the difference between organic and inorganic is a matter of semantics? If I can't eat it- its inorganic. What seperates the dead from the living: energy. Lights-- Cameras- action. We are all living on Star Poop. Gives new meaning to the Lord of the Flies, ehh? Got Donuts? National Donut Bored Some people realize that they are the product of all that came before them, some think they are above all that is.

  • Life's older than it's ever been
    and now it's even older,
    and now it's even older,
    and now it's even older.
    Life's older than it's ever been
    and now it's even older,
    and now it's older still.
  • In the article, it says:
    The Penn State researchers conclude that the reduced carbon was not produced by high heat and then incorporated into the soil as it formed nor was it deposited after the soil formed by migrating petroleum.

    I didn't realized petroleum migrated. Would that explain the giant moving pools of oil that slime over my hometown twice a year? Does oil spend the summer in Alaska and go to Saudi Arabia every fall?

    -----------------
  • Galvatron:
    20-30 billion years old?

    The age of the Universe is somewhere between 12 and 18 giga-years [nasa.gov].
  • How can you write that the poster was being intolerant of other people's beliefs, and in the same post, write that that same poster "...must understand that religion supersedes[sic]science..."? Why does he have to believe that religion supercedes science?
    It seems to me that instead of promoting understanding, your post seeks to force a belief system upon another.

  • Re:Reward $250,000 (us) (Score:2)

    by Anonymous Coward
    Funny how the U.S. is the only western civilization where people like you still are commonplace.

    Here in Europe we reasoned like that, oh, maybe a hundred years ago.

    Why should thousands upon thousands of mainly christian scientists spend decades upon decades working hard on a gigantic conspiracy to overthrow creationism?

    Many of them, in every scientific field you can think of, didn't like what they found. But the reality of things proved that the Bible was wrong in a bunch of things.

    Now why is that so hard to believe? I find it much harder to believe that any of the of the ancient religious creation myths allover the world could be right. There is a creation myth for every village in africa that is just as "believable" as that in the Bible.

    Grow up! If there was a chapter about Santa in the bible, I bet you would believe it too!

  • This is just terrestrial life, not life on earth. Life in the ocean is still much older than this.

    What really happened is that life came out of the ocean 2.6 billion years ago, hit the snooze button, and then went back to the ocean for another 1.4 billion years. At least, that's what I would have done.
  • A new born baby has astounded the scientific world by not growing older. FBI agents on the scene deny rumours they are looking for Elvis, who is said to be leading a flotilla of UFOs projecting a stasis field.

    --


  • >> The Oldest Known Life Keeps Getting Older

    > As opposed to all those things that don't get older everyday???

    Well, right, but this time, this particular early date moved backwards by more than just one day.
    Let's see you do that...
  • Creationism, as it was written in Genesis, is revealed in very simple terms and anthropomorphizes God so the simpletons of many thousand years ago could comprehend it. Could you tell a shepard of 500 B.C. about how amino acid chains are formed?

    The current vesion of the creation in Genesis is actually two stories badly edited together.

    These events, as they are described in Genesis, are actually correct if we look at them in a simple way. The intent was to show a forward progression in that the earth was created then water then man. etc... The point here is to show a sequence and therefore set a foundation. The first day, second day, etc. was to show progression in a way simple people would understand. Millions or even billions of years would have made no sense to these people. The answer to creation that these early people received was not wrong, it was right for that day and age and it was all that people of that era could understand. Today however, the literal interpretation is wrong and misleading.

    Assuming the original audience didn't recognise it as an analogy in the first place. They may not have been "scientists" but the are unlikely to have been stupid. A stupid shepherd isn't going to live long...
  • Well, if these 2.6 billion year old microbial mats do indeed form 'First Post', we can at least say with certainty that there is life far, far older. Look at any run of 'first post'ers.. Eight tries, and only one of them manages 50% of the time.
  • I guess that this will once again become a matter of organized religious debate. Does this mean that carbon dating is "once again" wrong (laughing on the inside) or is Adam and Eve (if you Christian, which I am not) just that much older now?

  • My third grade teacher, Mrs. Williams, is the oldest form of life. Hmmm... come to think of it, she may have been inorganic.

  • strangely, in the next sediment layer below their sample, the geologists found the following rock formation:

    oooooooooooooooo
    oFFFFFooPPPPPo
    oFoooooooPoooPo
    oFFFFFooPPPPPo
    oFoooooooPooooo
    oFoooooooPooooo
    ooooooooooooooo
    ..............

  • Don't get me wrong. Very old terrestrial life is a big deal. But 2.6-2.7 bya isn't all *that* long ago.

    To me, one of the most interesting things associated with this find has to do with the evolution of an oxygen-rich atmosphere: if there were terrestrial microbial communities, there was almost certainly an ozone layer (to protect them from the otherwise-deadly UV radiation), and an ozone layer can only develop if there's a significant amount of free oxygen in the atmosphere.

    The thinking used to be [astronomica.org] that oxygen really didn't start to accumulate in the atmosphere until about 2 billion years ago, and didn't reach life-protecting levels (i.e., formed a good ozone layer) until about 1.4 billion years ago (there was a lot of iron that had to be "rusted" out of the oceans first). This finding is part of a recent trend (sorry, no links) which have pushed this date back quite a bit (leaving some issues with the banded-iron deposits -- the relics of the "rusting" period, but WTF, one of the best characteristics of science is that it changes itself to fit the hard facts, when necessary...).

    ---

  • While I don't disagree about evolution potentially being fast, in this case (assuming the new findings hold) there were still something like 1200 million years between the first known ocean life and the first known land life...

    I suspect life was ready for the transition before the environment was. I have this funny vision of the ocean stuff keeping an eye on the land, saying "Okay, now, it's getting ripe -- get ready to go for it!"

    As an interesting aside, last week's Science had a great paper [sciencemag.org] (summary here [sciencemag.org]) about new discoveries possibly related to early life: an RNA-analogue which uses much simpler tetrose backbone sugars, and is still able to not only form stable Watson-Crick helices with itself, but also with complementary RNA and DNA! The RNA backbone monomers (beta-nucleotides) are difficult to form under primordial conditions, while the tetrose sugars are almost trivially easy to form under prebiotic reducing conditions. This is the first of what's anticipated to be a whole family of plausible RNA precursors -- and that's a huge first!

    Not to start a flame war, but it's a major chunk of hard scientific evidence (as opposed to speculation and theorizing) supporting a gradualist development of biotic chemistry -- and a very significant blow to those who argue for creationism based on the complexity of RNA and DNA chemistry. The gaps keep getting smaller...

    ---

  • I didn't realized petroleum migrated.

    What do you mean? African or European petroleum?

  • "Does this mean that carbon dating is "once again" wrong (laughing on the inside) or is Adam and Eve (if you Christian, which I am not) just that much older now?"

    This is very dualistic thinking. This is Aristotolian logic gone mad. Our western society is based on this and our language and mindset forces us to catagorize and separate into this or that. We see true or false, zero or one, black or white, all or none. The big bang vs. creationism argument goes back a long way. The question I ask science is: who made the big bang? I do believe in God but I also logically follow science and I've learned to take things from a historical perspective. Here is my perspective that I will now share with you.

    Creationism, as it was written in Genesis, is revealed in very simple terms and anthropomorphizes God so the simpletons of many thousand years ago could comprehend it. Could you tell a shepard of 500 B.C. about how amino acid chains are formed? Could you explain to him time on a "geologic scale" and have him comprehend that kind of time span? Can you describe a non-physical being accurately with physical terms? No... The best that could be done was a very simple approach to give people the foundation or sequence of events that would eventually lead to man's creation.

    These events, as they are described in Genesis, are actually correct if we look at them in a simple way. The intent was to show a forward progression in that the earth was created then water then man. etc... The point here is to show a sequence and therefore set a foundation. The first day, second day, etc. was to show progression in a way simple people would understand. Millions or even billions of years would have made no sense to these people. The answer to creation that these early people received was not wrong, it was right for that day and age and it was all that people of that era could understand. Today however, the literal interpretation is wrong and misleading. We have evolved spiritually, intellectually, and mentally.

    Do you teach a child calculus in the first grade? NO... you give him the foundation. Calculus will later be understood by the high school senior. If a child asks what makes him grow bigger you'll probably give him a glass of milk and tell him to eat his greens. You wouldn't tell him the intricacies of cell mitosis - cyclin dependent kinase, adds phosphate to a protein, along with cyclins, which are control switches for the cell cycle to move from blah blah... The kid would get bored and this info would go right over his head. Hence, it is too early for him to absorb this level of knowledge just as it would have been to difficult to explain the creation in scientific terms to illiterate shepards of 2500 years ago.

    So where am I going with this you ask? Maybe you've already figured it out. Today, we have an understanding of our physical universe that nobody in previous eras of history could have ever imagined. Do I now discount genesis? No... I simply realize that this very simple childlike description of creation was setting the foundation for science. Science is one of God's most important creations and allows us to understand our physical environment. Big bang, is but one idea describing the method which God 'may' have used to create our earth as we know it. We are still learning and we are still progressing. Creationism and Big Bang/science do not cancel each other out. One is an extension of the other. The mature college senior understands human reproduction while the immature first grader has a rudimentary understanding of how chickens make eggs. The chicken/egg textbook is setting the foundation for the human reproductive cycle as it will be understood in biology class much later in life. Again, Creation was good then, Science helps us understand they physical properties of how the earth may have come to be. I have no doubt that God is the mastermind behind all of this, however, to say that the Earth is 6,000 years old and God simply waved his hand and created us is a simply childish and ludicrous explanation that has no bearing in this day and age.

    A thousand years from now, our understanding will be even greater. The future beings will look upon our rudimentary view of science and call it primitive at best. Perhaps, they will have figured out some of the mysteries and maybe they will laugh at the thought of a "Big Bang" theory as we know it. They will call us simple and childlike, lacking intellect, and understanding. History will repeat itself.

  • Something really is older than dirt!!
  • Yes, your teacher was on crack. As someone else mentioned, the Torah is the first five books of the Bible. The King James edition isn't the most accurate translation, but Adam and Eve are certainly in the original text. The germ of fact behind your story is that it says God created humans, "male and female" before Eve is mentioned. Various interpretations say that "female" refers to Eve, Lilith or some weird hermaphrodite creature. You can believe me or your teacher, or you can learn Hebrew and see for yourself. ;-)

    The part about Shakespeare comes from a parody of numerology in Scientific American years ago - Shakespeare had nothing to do with the King James translation [urbanlegends.com].

    In any case, this doesn't affect religious views on creation any more than existing knowledge did -- pushing fossils back another billion years doesn't make the case for a strict Biblical interpretation any more flimsy. Besides, this is evidence for early terrestrial life. There was life in the oceans well before that.

  • Re:Carbon dating accuracy (Score:4)

    by MaxGrant ( 159031 ) on Wednesday November 29, 2000 @06:00PM (#593517) Homepage Journal
    Carbon-14 isn't what's used for those kinds of timelines. It's longer-lived substances like Uranium. And the fact of the matter is your concerns would have some weight if it weren't for the fact that something like five separate methods, using separate radioactive isotopes, achive dating results that are in precise agreement with each other.

    Also, if radioactive decay rates were greater in the past (by the extent required to explain the Creationist timeline) then the ambient radioactivity on the surface of the earth would have wiped it clean of life in Biblical times.

    Also, If rates of radioactive decay varied even by a little bit such devices as atomic bombs and nuclear reactors would simply not work. Fission explosions require nanosecond timing in the machinery of the bomb.

    Finally, you can postulate all you like about exterior conditions to radioactivity but you have not established causality. You have proposed no mechanism that could be used to explain variable radioactivity, let alone put forward a testable hypothesis. Just because you don't understand it does not mean that it's incomprehensible.

    Creationists try to make this subject sound much more subjective than it is. Don't take my word for it. Read up on the subject, if you're as open minded as you claim. Nuclear physics is really not that hard to understand when you want to know the whys and wherefores of these kinds of issues. But don't appeal to your own ignorance. I already know how it works and am comfortable with it. So is anyone who bothers to understand what they're talking about. And if you're too lazy to, well I'm sorry. You'll get the same kind of RTFM responses that any other kind of clueless newbie would get.

  • The ultimate... (Score:4)

    by Verteiron ( 224042 ) on Wednesday November 29, 2000 @01:08PM (#593518) Homepage
    Curiously, the shape of these organic mats seems almost to form the letters of two english words, "First post". Of course, no conclusions can be drawn from this, and it has been attributed to mere happenstance...

  • huh? (Score:5)

    by Rombuu ( 22914 ) on Wednesday November 29, 2000 @01:01PM (#593519)
    The Oldest Known Life Keeps Getting Older

    As opposed to all those things that don't get older everyday???

  • Oldest life not any older. (Score:5)

    by yardgnome ( 190624 ) on Wednesday November 29, 2000 @01:28PM (#593520) Homepage

    Don't let the headline fool you. By no means does this push back the age of the oldest known life. The paper reports on new evidence of terrestrial life. But, as stated in the article, there is evidence that the oceans were teeming with life as far back as 3.8 billion years ago (just after Heavy Bombardment ended). And by teeming, I mean there are fossilized structures (stromatolites) that can be many meters high, which were created solely by ancient bacteria.

    Don't get me wrong. Very old terrestrial life is a big deal. But 2.6-2.7 bya isn't all *that* long ago.

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