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, ...

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

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 ...

A new study used mathematical formulas and demonstrated that it’s highly unlikely life began on Earth. Instead, the researcher points to panspermia, a theory that life or the ingredients for life came ...

When the Earth froze over, where did life shelter? MIT scientists say one refuge may have been pools of melted ice that dotted the planet’s icy surface. In a study appearing in Nature Communications, ...

Salt is an essential nutrient for the human body. But hundreds of millions of years before the first humans, salt minerals once shaped entire landscapes. They even determined where early life on Earth ...

Scientists have shown that Earth’s basic chemistry solidified within just three million years of the Solar System’s formation. Initially, the planet was barren and inhospitable, missing water and ...

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 ...