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How old is the earliest trace of life on Earth?


The question of when life began on Earth is as old as human culture.

“It's one of these fundamental human questions: When did life appear on Earth?” said Professor Martin Whitehouse of the Swedish Museum of Natural History.

So when some apparently biological carbon was dated to at least 3.95 billion years ago—making it the oldest remains of life on Earth—the claim sparked interest and skepticism in equal measure, as Ars Technica reported in 2017.

Whitehouse was among those skeptics. This July, he presented new evidence to the Goldschmidt Conference in Prague that the carbon in question is only between 2.7–2.8 billion years old, making it younger than other traces of life found elsewhere.

Organic carbon?

The carbon in question is in rock in Labrador, Canada. The rock was originally silt on the seafloor that, it's argued, hosted early microbial life that ...


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