Paleontology - Overview of The History of Life

Overview of The History of Life

The evolutionary history of life stretches back to over 3,000 million years ago, possibly as far as 3,800 million years ago. Earth formed about 4,570 million years ago and, after a collision that formed the Moon about 40 million years later, may have cooled quickly enough to have oceans and an atmosphere about 4,440 million years ago. However there is evidence on the Moon of a Late Heavy Bombardment from 4,000 to 3,800 million years ago. If, as seem likely, such a bombardment struck Earth at the same time, the first atmosphere and oceans may have been stripped away. The oldest clear evidence of life on Earth dates to 3,000 million years ago, although there have been reports, often disputed, of fossil bacteria from 3,400 million years ago and of geochemical evidence for the presence of life 3,800 million years ago. Some scientists have proposed that life on Earth was "seeded" from elsewhere, but most research concentrates on various explanations of how life could have arisen independently on Earth.

For about 2,000 million years microbial mats, multi-layered colonies of different types of bacteria, were the dominant life on Earth. The evolution of oxygenic photosynthesis enabled them to play the major role in the oxygenation of the atmosphere from about 2,400 million years ago. This change in the atmosphere increased their effectiveness as nurseries of evolution. While eukaryotes, cells with complex internal structures, may have been present earlier, their evolution speeded up when they acquired the ability to transform oxygen from a poison to a powerful source of energy in their metabolism. This innovation may have come from primitive eukaryotes capturing oxygen-powered bacteria as endosymbionts and transforming them into organelles called mitochondria. The earliest evidence of complex eukaryotes with organelles such as mitochondria, dates from 1,850 million years ago.

Multicellular life is composed only of eukaryotic cells, and the earliest evidence for it is the Francevillian Group Fossils from 2,100 million years ago, although specialization of cells for different functions first appears between 1,430 million years ago (a possible fungus) and 1,200 million years ago (a probable red alga). Sexual reproduction may be a prerequisite for specialization of cells, as an asexual multicellular organism might be at risk of being taken over by rogue cells that retain the ability to reproduce.

The earliest known animals are cnidarians from about 580 million years ago, but these are so modern-looking that the earliest animals must have appeared before then. Early fossils of animals are rare because they did not develop mineralized hard parts that fossilize easily until about 548 million years ago. The earliest modern-looking bilaterian animals appear in the Early Cambrian, along with several "weird wonders" that bear little obvious resemblance to any modern animals. There is a long-running debate about whether this Cambrian explosion was truly a very rapid period of evolutionary experimentation; alternative views are that modern-looking animals began evolving earlier but fossils of their precursors have not yet been found, or that the "weird wonders" are evolutionary "aunts" and "cousins" of modern groups. Vertebrates remained an obscure group until the first fish with jaws appeared in the Late Ordovician.

The spread of life from water to land required organisms to solve several problems, including protection against drying out and supporting themselves against gravity. The earliest evidence of land plants and land invertebrates date back to about 476 million years ago and 490 million years ago respectively. The lineage that produced land vertebrates evolved later but very rapidly between 370 million years ago and 360 million years ago; recent discoveries have overturned earlier ideas about the history and driving forces behind their evolution. Land plants were so successful that they caused an ecological crisis in the Late Devonian, until the evolution and spread of fungi that could digest dead wood.

During the Permian period synapsids, including the ancestors of mammals, may have dominated land environments, but the Permian–Triassic extinction event 251 million years ago came very close to wiping out complex life. During the slow recovery from this catastrophe a previously obscure group, archosaurs, became the most abundant and diverse terrestrial vertebrates. One archosaur group, the dinosaurs, were the dominant land vertebrates for the rest of the Mesozoic, and birds evolved from one group of dinosaurs. During this time mammals' ancestors survived only as small, mainly nocturnal insectivores, but this apparent set-back may have accelerated the development of mammalian traits such as endothermy and hair. After the Cretaceous–Paleogene extinction event 65 million years ago killed off the non-avian dinosaurs – birds are the only surviving dinosaurs – mammals increased rapidly in size and diversity, and some took to the air and the sea.

Fossil evidence indicates that flowering plants appeared and rapidly diversified in the Early Cretaceous, between 130 million years ago and 90 million years ago. Their rapid rise to dominance of terrestrial ecosystems is thought to have been propelled by coevolution with pollinating insects. Social insects appeared around the same time and, although they account for only small parts of the insect "family tree", now form over 50% of the total mass of all insects.

Humans evolved from a lineage of upright-walking apes whose earliest fossils date from over 6 million years ago. Although early members of this lineage had chimp-sized brains, about 25% as big as modern humans', there are signs of a steady increase in brain size after about 3 million years ago. There is a long-running debate about whether modern humans are descendants of a single small population in Africa, which then migrated all over the world less than 200,000 years ago and replaced previous hominine species, or arose worldwide at the same time as a result of interbreeding.