Four billion years ago, Earth was violent, hot, and unstable. Yet new research suggests that by then, life had already reached a surprising level of complexity. At that time lived the last universal ...

Life on Earth had to begin somewhere, and scientists think that “somewhere” is LUCA—or the Last Universal Common Ancestor.

The investigation suggests that LUCA lived on Earth 4.2 billion years ago and had an immune system that could fight off ...

The organism that gave rise to all life present on Earth may have evolved much earlier than once thought, just a few hundred million years after the planet formed, and been more sophisticated than ...

A digital representation illustrating how LUCA was already under attack from viruses even at 4.2 billion years ago. An international team of researchers led by the University of Bristol has shed light ...

Imagine the tree of life. The tip of every branch represents one species, and if you follow any two branches back through time, you'll hit an... Life as we know it descended from a single cell. What ...

"Hearst Magazines and Yahoo may earn commission or revenue on some items through these links." All life on Earth can be traced back to a Last Universal Common Ancestor, or LUCA. A new study suggests ...

"Hearst Magazines and Yahoo may earn commission or revenue on some items through these links." All life on Earth can be traced back to a Last Universal Common Ancestor, or LUCA. A new study suggests ...

All life on Earth can be traced back to a Last Universal Common Ancestor, or LUCA. A new study suggests that this organism likely lived on Earth only 400 million years after its formation. Further ...