A new research has suggested that life on Earth might have emerged about 750 million years earlier than previously thought.
According to a report in New Scientist, researchers have found unusually light isotopes of carbon, a common indicator of life, in the Earth's oldest mineral deposit, found in the Jack Hills in Western Australia.
The carbon dates to more than 4.25 billion years ago, a time known as the Hadean period.
Life is largely considered to have emerged around 3.5 billion years ago, after a violent period known as the Late Heavy Bombardment, in which a large amount of space debris walloped and may have sterilised the Earth.
But the Jack Hills find suggests that life might have existed well before that time, although researchers caution it is too early to draw a definite conclusion.
"We now have an indication that it might be life," said mineralogist Thorsten Geisler of the Institute for Mineralogy at the University of Munster in Germany.
Geisler and colleagues dated samples from the Jack Hills area by measuring the abundance of radioactive elements in zircon deposits.
They then analysed the concentration of carbon-13 and carbon-12 found in small pieces of diamond and graphite trapped within the zircon.
They found the ratio of carbon-12, a lighter isotope of carbon, to carbon-13 was unusually high. Light carbon suggests the presence of organic material.
But it is too early to say for certain whether the carbon might indicate life.
"We can't say now that we have unambiguous evidence of life before the Late Heavy Bombardment," Geisler told New Scientist.
That's because certain non-biological chemical reactions can also create light carbon, although the ratio is so skewed towards the lighter isotope that these reactions can't easily account for it.
A reservoir of light carbon might also indicate that simple organic compounds might have existed on Earth, priming the environment for the later emergence of life.
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