Its possible that the circumstances for Pre-life were in existence between 5bn — 3.5bn yrs ago. That gives about 1.5bn years to form the elements of life, create precellular elements, then create by 3.5bn yrs ago the first single celled life that is recorded in the rocks ie the Cyanobacteria family. Those bacteria are still around today and were responsible then for the creation of an oxygen atmosphere, and its my understanding they are still doing that today. I would be very interested in comparing the genome of one of those ancient bacteria with the genome of a modern Cyanobacteria to see if anything has changed. The genome of Cyanobacterium synechocystis sp. Strain PCC6803 has been mapped to about 3.6M bp!!! See
http://dna-res.kazusa.or.jp/1/6/06/PDF/1_303.pdf Obviously a simple life as far as life on earth today is concerned ( infact its the simplest form of singled-celled life ,as I understand it ) but relative to the simple precellular life back then its incredibly complex. And the earth had as we say about 1.5bn years to form it and be recorded in some of the oldest rocks on earth. So I think the appearance of Cyanobacteria in the precambrian eon and complementary rocks that contain them must represent some higher first fossilized successful start of cell production.
Since there is no cellular life in the fossil record prior to this I would suggest that the parts that would go to make up this incredibly complex first form of uni-cellular life somehow couldn’t get fossilized. Ie the parts had the properties such that they would quickly be desolved, changed, transformed. It would be interesting to examine the chemistry of the rocks around and prior to 3.5bn years ago to see if the chemical composition could give any clues as to the chemical composition of intermediate parts of uni-cellular life. I suggest that the intermediate parts degraded too quickly to ever be fossilized, and maybe the conditions of pre-cellular ‘life’ where akin to the circumstances and processes in the early universe, not long after the big bang. Where particles were being created and destroyed rapidly and it wasn’t until the universe expanded and cooled enough that the circumstances of rapid chaos settled down to allow certain stable products to appear. Maybe the same sort of thing happened in the first 1.5bn years of the earths existence?
MOSSEYZ
2004 Ian Moss
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