“Oldest record of life on Earth” found in Quebec | Hacker News Reader

“Oldest record of life on Earth” found in Quebec

ctvnews.ca

56 pointsmthoms14 comments

About this:

"scientists found fossilized traces of bacteria in iron ore samples"

I'm not clear if the scientists declared this to be bacteria, in the technical sense, or if the journalist decided to use the word "bacteria" as a synonym for "single celled organism". Does anyone know? Is the claim that this is definitely bacteria, and not Archaea?

Also, on a slightly different topic, this would mean that life existed at a time when Earth was still getting hit with immense asteroids, of the type that would leave craters at least 800 kilometers across (as we know was happening to the moon at the same time). Everyone I've read on this topic assumes such a massive hit would sterilize the whole planet. So did the single celled organisms survive such hits, or was life re-created many times?

Yes, previously people believed that the heavy bombardment would have sterilized the earth. Apparently (hard to say for sure) that assumption was wrong.

It raises all sorts of exciting questions and completely changes the landscape for what early life looked like.

>Also, on a slightly different topic, this would mean that life existed at a time when Earth was still getting hit with immense asteroids, of the type that would leave craters at least 800 kilometers across (as we know was happening to the moon at the same time). Everyone I've read on this topic assumes such a massive hit would sterilize the whole planet. So did the single celled organisms survive such hits, or was life re-created many times?

Nobody knows! It's an important question though, especially if you believe in some variant of the 'Great Filter' hypothesis. If the leap from organic molecules to single-celled life is "easy" (as demonstrated by repeated iteration in our past) then the filter lays beyond that. Then the question is whether multicellular life is the big leap?

> did the single celled organisms survive such hits

or perhaps life itself was delivered by these hits ?

> Does anyone know? Is the claim that this is definitely bacteria, and not Archaea?

Shouldn't really be either; this should be quite a bit older than Last Universal Common Ancestor and hence older than the Bacteria/Archaea split. But I don't actually understand what precisely was found so can't say.

I strongly recommend visiting the Miguasha National Park (which is a Unesco World Heritage Site) if you are in Quebec.

They have a great collection of fossils and some great trails you can hike on.

It's close to a lot of touristic areas too!

http://whc.unesco.org/en/list/686

I just wanted to point out that it is in the province of Quebec but pretty far from the bigger cities like Montréal or Quebec City (about 8 hour drive from Montréal).

I'm not exactly sure as to how they do it because as a local I simply drive the 8 hours but a lot of tourists choose to spent their vacation in that region of Quebec, skipping the city life Montréal and Québec City.

I see a lot of Europeans and a lot of Asians tourist when I go to Gaspé!

That's actually pretty cool. I'm trying to go to Gaspé/Percé for my next vacation.

Make sure you visit les Îles-de-la-Madeleine (Magdalen Islands) at least once in your life! Pretty unique islands!

I will for sure. We went to visit Manic-5 two years ago and loved it. There so much places I've never visited in the province yet and I want to change that!

I think it absokutely amazing that life has been around on our tiny planet for 1/3–1/4 the existence of the universe. Wow, what a feat!

Maybe we're the 3rd 4th "generation" of intelligent life, or even earlier! What a lonely feat.

In fact, for a long time the methods used to date the universe using cosmic observation would gave us dates that were more recent than some of the older rocks on earth.