Millions of years ago, life was mostly in the oceans. Many scientists speculate that much of life originated there, and then gradually some of them made it to land. Life on land has been a gradual transition, as animal habitat on land has been 300 million years older than previously known.
Evidence has come out that life on land has been much older. Scientists from Berlin, Potsdam and Jena have been making a study on how life shifted its focus on land after living in the sea. The team studying this is led by Sami Nabhan of the Freie Universitat Berlin.
The team has studied some of the oldest rocks on Earth. This rock formation can be found from South Africa's Barberton greenstone belt. In that area, the team has seen evidence of life coming out of the oceans much earlier than expected.
This evidence has been found within tiny grains of iron sulfide mineral pyrite. A study of these grains showed signs of microbial activity. The evidence can be seen as very small amounts of distributions. Through their study, the team discovered that a small fraction of isotope 34S in the pyrite showed that they differ from others in that same rim. The small fractions found that microbes had processed the sulfur there.
The rock sample taken has been dated to be about 3.22 billion years old, according to Phys Org. This has been made by instrumentation installed in Potsdam in 2013. Samples were tested at the GFZ German Research Centre for Giosciences. The tests were conducted by Michael Wiedenbeck from the GFZ secondary ion mass spectrometry (SIMS) lab.
The samples taken is speculated to have been transported by an ancient river system, as Eureka Alert reports. The microbes lived in the soil, at conditions that shifted between wet and dry times. In time the microbes have produced the rim overgrowths that have been found on the pyrite crystals.
With this evidence, life on land has started much earlier. Animal habitat on land has been 300 million years older than previously known. Also reported earlier is that Neanderthals ate vegetables.
