Life on Earth: 'Millions of years older'.

Life on Earth: 'Millions of years older'.

news.bbc.co.uk

Traces of animal life have been found in rocks dating back 635 million years.

The evidence takes the form of chemical markers that are highly distinctive of sponges when they die and their bodies break down in rock-forming sediments.

The discovery in Oman pushes back the earliest accepted date for animal life on Earth by tens of millions of years.

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As usual, 'the scientists' have been thinking out of the box and working out solutions to problems that provide answers to our questions. An eternal question of the enquiring mind is, "When did Life begin?" Scientists personify the enquiring mind compelled to action.

The fossil record requires some substance; a measure of solidity that leaves it's mark within the rocks and earth. The further back in time we look, the harder it is to find evidence of that life. The remnants of ancient microbial life can be found in 'junk' DNA...arguably.

They've started looking for the breakdown products of lipids (fat-soluble, molecular parts of structural membranes) in rocks. This has resulted, in this instance, with the evidence that life was here on Earth millions of years earlier than was shown. Future studies should extend these estimates. These sponges existed 600 million years ago. The evolution that led up to them would have taken a *few* more years.

My 'Big Question' is when did the inanimate become animate? At a point in Earth's history...something moved by itself. Imagine being witness to that moment?! As we extend life on this planet and science keeps occupying ever-distant periods of time, we come closer to identifying that moment. The first cell twitched...

news.bbc.co.uk
(visit the link for the full news article)

Meh.

I dunno what to believe..
but I hear it's fact nothing can be carbon dated back any more than 6,000 years ago.

You hear it's fact? Riiight. Keep believing the "proof" written in one book and ignoring the others, some older than yours, as well as the world around you.

No, but we know how long it takes for the various strata to form because of what we can carbon date, in addition to analyzing what's actually in the strata. By counting the strata, we can know how long ago a specific piece of dirt got its contents.

It's like counting the rings in a tree trunk. If there's a knot in the rings, you can count how many rings in the knot was to find out how long ago the knot formed.