Life that arose and disappeared on earth.

Life on Earth had to go through a series of phases, one of them was the leap to complex life. For billions of years, the Earth was made up of bacteria and single-celled beings, but for some reason that we still do not understand very well. Evolution considered that uniting cells to create complex organisms was a much better thing. This is supposed to have happened about 630 million years ago and from the first multicellular beings emerged all the complex animals and plants that we know and exist, and that existed in the past, from worms to giant trees, whales, dinosaurs and humans, although we are talking After millions of years, evolution was quite rapid and after a few hundred million years there were already large animals in the seas and then they conquered the mainland. This thing that we know supposedly occurred 630 million years ago, at least the thread that we have through the fossil record, that we have been discovering in all these years, they have been discovering and analyzing fossils for almost more than 150 years scientifically, this We know it can change radically with the latest discovery that has been made and it also opens a new mystery.

A team led by Cardiff University has discovered evidence of a much older ecosystem, of much older complex animals, in the Frankville Basin near Gabon on the Atlantic coast of Central Africa, analyzing geochemical sedimentary rocks. marine dating the findings to 2.1 billion years ago, those 1.47 billion years before the date on which the first complex beings are believed to have occurred, is mind-blowing.

Researchers have come to the conclusion that it was due to the union of several circumstances, apparently the tectonic plates collided and cut a section of the ocean, creating a shallow inland sea irrigated with a large amount of nutrients from nearby volcanic eruptions and rivers. and a lot of sources of nutrients that served to feed that sea and the life forms that had remained in it.

The interesting thing is that in that ocean, in that soup rich in nutrients, the conditions could have existed for this multicellular life to emerge, because in addition there was already photosynthesis and in those cells there were headquarters that carried out photosynthesis and that photosynthesis oxygenates the water with which these beings had many nutrients and a lot of oxygenation, oxygenation is important because it produces more energy for living beings, this is also not very clear why those living beings also ended up uniting, because evolution or nature considered that It was more profitable and more advantageous to unite unicellular beings and create complex, multicellular beings, but it happened.

And the important thing is that according to researchers, this paradise of multicellular life, unfortunately, did not end up expanding, but instead died, it came to an end when the inland sea disappeared with the movement of the continents and ended up dry, these beings did not manage to get out of that sea. and they perished.

Can you imagine that they had managed to leave and colonize the rest of the planet, life on Earth would now be 1.47 billion years more evolved than the current one, we would be another species, in addition this discovery raises other questions such as, there were other similar events, but they came out badly, perhaps due to an ecological disaster, a volcanic eruption, the impact of a giant asteroid.

We can also ask ourselves another question, because this also affects the search for life outside of Earth, one of the parameters we need to calculate what number of possibilities life may have to emerge on other worlds, is to know at what speed life evolves, At the moment, from what we knew about this discovery, what we could assume is that single-celled life was quite basic and covered practically most of the time of the existence of life on Earth, which in theory was the easiest thing to do. Unicellular life was the easy format in which we could find life that multicellular life, that is, complex animals like us would be more difficult to find and that Earth calendar, the one we had, was the one we were applying to the search. of life outside of Earth, but this discovery changes things a lot, it means that in other worlds the transition from single-celled life to animal life could have occurred successfully much earlier.