Scientists Directly Date 3.5-Billion-Year-Old Evidence of Life For The First Time

Colorized image of a zircon crystal under scanning electron micrograph – not the crystal studied. (Emmanuel Roquette/Wikimedia CC BY 4.0) Sometime in Earth's distant past, nearly 4 billion years ago, our planet's earliest lifeforms somehow coalesced from primordial chemistry. Not much remains of the earliest organisms that inhabited Earth. Time and geology have changed whatever remains almost…