The Australian National University has uncovered the truth about how animals first stepped foot on Earth, which was a turning point in the history of the planet – a period of time without which humans may not have been able to come into existence.
The answers to the age-old question regarding the arrival of the first animals on Earth, come from prehistoric sedimentary rocks that were uncovered in Central Australia. Upon examining the rocks and extracting molecules of ancient life from them, scientists were able to find that over 650 million years ago, a revolution among ecosystems took place with the arrival of algae. The rise of algae had supposedly triggered a worldwide event on Earth known as Snowball Earth that caused the earth to become frozen for nearly 50 million years. After extreme global heating that followed, the glaciers and ice fell into rivers and lakes and in the right temperatures, formed algae.
According to Independent, algae are the ancestors of all of us. It is because of the formation of these algae that the food pyramid at the base began to develop rapidly and the higher the pyramid rose, the more complex the nutrients and the organisms became, which eventually led to the arrival of humans on the planet. Dr Amber Jarrett, who is from the ANU, the Snowball Earth event was what determined human life on the planet. Not only does this study answer when humans came into existence, but it also answers how changes in weather, the landscape, the growth of plants and trees, all took place with algae being the primary reason and cause behind the evolution of the planet.
This study could help us in understanding about how life could be made possible outside the Earth as well. The study is proving to be ground-breaking as the origin of Earth has been the most puzzling of anomalies to be fully theorized and explained. This will enable researchers to further implement studies of that time period alone, during the Neoproterozoic period that will help in tracking other solar systems whose planets also faced similar events, proving extra-terrestrial life. The possibilities that can come out of such a discovery are huge, and in order to provide a broader sense of understanding, the team behind the study is going to present the findings at the Goldschmidt Conference in Paris later this week.
With this evidence at hand, we might finally know the true creation of man on this planet?