00:00Historically, experts have theorized that complex life began on our planet around 635 million years ago as those organisms evolved from the primordial ooze.
00:13However, experts now say that new evidence challenges that timeline and that complex life could have begun more than a billion years before that.
00:20Researchers say they have uncovered signs of new fossils in the sedimentary marine rocks off the west coast of Africa.
00:26These are those macro fossils discovered in the Franceville Basin.
00:30They have used advanced dating techniques to divine that they were created some 2.1 billion years ago, meaning these signs of life predate our previous oldest by around 1.5 billion years.
00:41They add this means there was likely another increase in marine phosphorus and seawater oxygen before the one which occurred 635 million years ago.
00:49The researchers posit that underwater volcanoes may have cut off parts of the ocean, creating shallow, nutrient-rich subsections of ocean.
00:56They say this points to a much more complex history of life formation on Earth than previously believed,
01:01adding that the complexity of these fossils points to an evolutionary leap and organism diversity, one you wouldn't find otherwise.
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