"Hearst Magazines and Yahoo may earn commission or revenue on some items through these links." All life on Earth can be traced back to a Last Universal Common Ancestor, or LUCA. A new study suggests ...

Four billion years ago, Earth was violent, hot, and unstable. Yet new research suggests that by then, life had already reached a surprising level of complexity. At that time lived the last universal ...

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Imagine the tree of life. The tip of every branch represents one species, and if you follow any two branches back through time, you'll hit an... Life as we know it descended from a single cell. What ...

A schematic tree of life with the primary domains, the Archaea and Bacteria shown in purple and blue, respectively and the secondary domain, Eukaryotes in green. The figure highlights key nodes in the ...

Properly deciphering the branching pathways of evolution could unlock the history of every component of natural biology.

Want to find some ancient fossils? Scratch yourself. Many of the genes in our cells evolved billions of years ago and a few of them can be traced back to the last common ancestor of all life. Now we ...

An error has occurred. Please try again. With a The Portland Press Herald subscription, you can gift 5 articles each month. It looks like you do not have any active ...

Here’s what you’ll learn when you read this story: All life on Earth can be traced back to a Last Universal Common Ancestor, or LUCA. A study suggests that this organism likely lived on Earth only 400 ...

All life on Earth can be traced back to a Last Universal Common Ancestor, or LUCA. A new study suggests that this organism likely lived on Earth only 400 million years after its formation. Further ...