A team of Australian and British geologists has uncovered fossilized, single-cell organisms that supposedly were able to thrive in an oxygen-free world nearly 3.4 billion years ago -- and are the oldest known fossils on earth.
Their claims, if substantiated, confirm that life evolved on earth surprisingly soon after the Late Heavy Bombardment, a period of mass destruction in which a young earth was bombarded with waves of asteroids, heating the surface to molten rock and boiling the oceans into an incandescent mist.
The bombardment ended around 3.85 billion years ago.
The newly found fossils, discovered near an isolated watering hole in the middle of the Australian Outback, belonged to primitive bacteria that lived on earth at a time previously thought to be too inhospitable for life.
Scientists argue that the primitive microbes used sulfur instead of oxygen to generate energy from food. To read more, click here.
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