The First Life on Earth

Recent study of world’s most ancient living things –camp of bacteria were found near the West Australia coast, imply that the first life on Earth may have started much earlier than the recent accepted date of about 3.5 billion years ago.
The colonies shape rock-like structures, known as stromatolites, near the tidal pools at Shark Bay: researchers have discovered that they are analogous with ancient stromatolite fossils, which found nearby Pilbara region, which considered as the oldest convincing evidence of life.
Complicated exploration by a team from UNSW Australian Centre for Astrobiology (ACA) have now revealed that the colonies are very biologically varied, involving many more than just a few species as previously thought and that the same was probably true of the 3.5 billion-year-old Pilbara stromatolites.
ACA Deputy Director Professor Brett Neilan said, “Powerful new chemistry and genomic tools have revealed that the Shark Bay stromatolites have remarkable biodiversity, with evidence so far of more than 100 species of bacteria,” .
“In effect, this suggests that by 3.5 billion years ago Earth was already teeming with diverse microbial life. If this is so, evolution must have already been going on for a long time. We can’t be sure, but certainly many tens of millions of years earlier. These findings could reset the start of the clock of life.”