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All Life on Earth Comes From One Single Ancestor. And It's So Much Older Than We Thought. (www.popularmechanics.com)

submitted 1 month ago by [email protected] to c/[email protected]

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[–] [email protected] 10 points 1 month ago (1 children)

No, since everything we know about the LUCA is from its descendants. Microorganisms without descendants wouldn’t leave behind any evidence of their existence.

[–] [email protected] 8 points 1 month ago (1 children)

Using genetics alone, sure. But maybe there’s fossil or geochemical evidence of early organisms not belonging to any of the three surviving domains—or maybe we could estimate it just from statistics.

[–] [email protected] 4 points 1 month ago (1 children)

Maybe but I don’t think fossil evidence has enough information to confirm something isn’t from the main branch of the tree of life.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 1 month ago

especially when some of that stuff took a while for us to realize it's even part of the same organism, or an organism at all.