Billions of years ago, Earth’s atmosphere was hostile, with barely any oxygen and toxic conditions for life. Researchers from the Earth-Life Science Institute studied Japan’s iron-rich hot springs, ...

Early Earth was a barren wasteland incapable of supporting life until a big protoplanet crash carried in the necessary ingredients, a new study suggests. That collision of the proto-Earth and a ...

The question of when life began on Earth is as old as human culture. “It’s one of these fundamental human questions: When did life appear on Earth?” said Professor Martin Whitehouse of the Swedish ...

(THE CONVERSATION) People have long wondered what life was first like on Earth, and if there is life in our solar system beyond our planet. Scientists have reason to believe that some of the moons in ...

Introduction : The coherence of history / Stephen Jay Gould -- The planetary setting of prebiotic evolution / Sherwood Chang -- Early environments : constraints and opportunities for early evolution / ...