For around half a century, the ‘Gaia’ hypothesis has provided a unique way of understanding how life has persisted on Earth, championing the idea that living organisms and their inorganic surroundings evolved together as a single, self-regulating system that has kept the planet habitable for life – despite threats such as a brightening Sun, volcanoes and meteorite strikes.
“Before this discovery, Palaeolithic archaeologists have for a long time been convinced that unambiguous symbols first appeared when Homo sapiens entered Europe, about 40 000 years ago, and later replaced local Neanderthals,” says Christopher Henshilwood at the Centre for Early Sapiens Behaviour and University of the Witwatersrand. “Recent archaeological discoveries in Africa, Europe and Asia, in which members of our team have often participated, support a much earlier emergence for the production and use of symbols.”
A single ancient molecule appears to be at the heart of the creation of life, “bringing us just a little bit closer to addressing the question of whether we are alone in the universe.”
“Many of the animals we are familiar with today are objectively bizarre compared with the Cambrian weird wonders. Frankly, butterflies and birds are stranger than anything swimming in the ancient sea.”
“Paleontologists know there are key moments in Earth’s history when extinction rates are high. For example, researchers have identified the Big Five mass extinctions: the five times over the past half billion years or so when more than three-quarters of the planet’s species have gone extinct in short order. Unfortunately, we are also now getting a good firsthand view of what extinction looks like, with the rapid increase in extinction rates over the last century.”
“The universe could so easily have remained lifeless and simple -just physics and chemistry, just the scattered dust of the cosmic explosion that gave birth to time and space,” observed evolutionary biologist Richard Dawkins.”The fact that it did not -the fact that life evolved out of literally nothing, some 10 billion years after the universe evolved literally out of nothing -is a fact so staggering that I would be mad to attempt words to do it justice. And even that is not the end of the matter. Not only did evolution happen: it eventually led to beings capable of comprehending the process by which they comprehend it.”
