Posted on 06/30/2010 8:05:22 PM PDT by NormsRevenge
PARIS (AFP) – Scientists unveiled fossils from west Africa Thursday that push back the dawn of multicellular life on Earth by at least 1.5 billion years.
Just how complex the newly discovered organisms are is sure to be hotly debated.
But there can be no doubt that the creatures unearthed from the hills of Gabon, visible to the naked eye, have upended standard evolutionary timelines.
"The cursor on the origin of complex multicellular life is no longer 600 million years ago, as has long been maintained, but more like 2.1 billion years," said Abderrazak El Albani, a researcher at the University of Poitiers and lead author of the study.
The findings were published in the British journal Nature.
Up to now, conventional scientific wisdom held that the planet was populated only by single-celled microbes until the so-called Cambrian explosion, a major surge of biodiversity that began some 600 million years ago.
Ever-more complex life forms emerged rapidly from there, eventually creating an evolutionary tree with homo sapiens atop one of its branches.
"Multicellularity represents one of the principle thresholds in evolutionary history," Philip Donoghue and Jonathan Antcliffe from the University of Bristol said in a commentary, also in Nature.
But the new organism, which appears to have lived in colonies, shows that the drive toward complexity began much sooner.
(Excerpt) Read more at news.yahoo.com ...
A virtual picture released by French Sciences institute CNRS shows external (L) and internal morphology of a fossil, part of fossils found in Franceville site in Gabon. Scientists unveiled fossils from west Africa Thursday that push back the dawn of multicellular life on Earth by at least 1.5 billion years. (AFP/CNRS/El Albani//Mazurier)
interesting stuff
yep - same kind of ‘scientists’ that tell us that global warming is caused by the activity of humans.
But it’s got to be true because it’s “peer reviewed”!
LOL - gad... watch out for those peers!
That seems to happen a lot.
And I guess that's OK. I mean, science uncovers new facts, forms new theories, and changes it's conclusions. That's growth. That's improvement.
But, the bottomline is that what the evolutionists thought was true last year, turns out to be no quite as true as they thought. But, if anyone stands up and says "I'm not so sure about this Evolution stuff. I hear what they're saying, and I don't think it's true."
Oh, you say something like that, and you get called all kinds of names.
I love evolutionists. When you can't possibly explain how something so complex developed by accident add another few hundred million years.
It’s amazing how the more we learn, the more abysmally ignorant we realize we are.
Well, call me a skeptic, but....
The one on the right is kinda cute with her clothes off.
Yes, but most won't acknowledge that conclusion.
But you know the earth is only 10,000 years old, right? LOL.
But you know the earth is only 10,000 years old, right? LOL.
Har!
Almost every theory they have ever theorized and accepted as fact has had to be rethought, reevaluated, and they are constantly dismayed, shocked, dazed, and confused.
For instance, “they” say that Venus can never support life because it is too hostile while failing to realize that the same conditions existed here billions of years ago.
And it is possible that billions of years before that, the same conditions existed on Mars.
The plain fact is no one has the remotest clue how old this solar system is and it frankly amazes ne that they keep assigning a finite time line for the entire universe.
It’s amazing how the more we learn, the more abysmally ignorant we realize we are.
Especially in the effort to disprove God. I know, some here will point out how some of us use “God” to explain anything we don’t understand...
300 billion years! And the universe is supposed to be only about 15 billion years old, right?
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