Scientists Find Earliest Evidence of Animal Life

[Adsos Letter]

Source: ABC
By MICHAEL KAHN
February 4, 2009

LONDON (Reuters) - Chemical traces left in 635 million-year-old rocks in Oman provide the earliest evidence so far of animal life, researchers said Wednesday.

The oldest sponge steroids detected in sedimentary rocks underly this cap carbonate,so pre-date the end of the Marinoan glaciations.
(Courtesy David Fik/NPG)The findings, published about a week before the 200th birthday of Charles Darwin, are also proof of the simple organisms the English naturalist said must have existed before evolving into more complex creatures, they researchers said.

"Basically we have found a thread of that evidence that he predicted should be there," said Roger Summons, a geobiologist at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology who worked on the study.

"There is a great wealth of evidence these sponges were the first multi-cellular organisms to exist."

Using a chemical analysis of molecules in rocks dated to 635 million years ago, the researchers discovered a modified form of cholesterol only produced by the sponges

http://abcnews.go.com/Technology/wireStory?id=6804066

[Peace Patriot]

1. 635 million years! Hard to even imagine such a time-frame. But that's how long it

took, more or less, for Nature to develop consciousness on Earth--out of a muck of tiny sponges and other goo.

I know that there are some theories around that us, thinking about it all, was random chance. Good theories, backed by a lot of evidence. And I do understand that we need to stop being such self-worshiping, ego-centric critters, thinking we're top of the chain, and it's all about us. But still, you gotto stand back in wonder at how we got here. And some of us--maybe most of us, at one time or another--DO stand back in wonder at how we got here. That may be the definition of us. Why would Nature do that? Or, put more scientifically, why would that succeed?

OR, given the mind-boggling time-frames of the development of suns, planets and life, maybe we are unable to grasp how brief and unimportant our success as as species has been, how little it matters that we were able to stand here and wonder at our existence, and what a failure our consciousness has been, as to preserving ourselves and our mother planet.

Oh dear.

:grouphug: