Refuting Creationism - Fossils of Complex Cells In Australian Mudstone - From 1.7 Billion Years Before 'Creation Week'

Layers of 1.7 billion-year-old sedimentary rocks, Kakadu National Park, Northern Territory

Maxwell Lechte

Fossils of single-celled eukaryotic organisms with complex surface features such as extensions and plates.

Leigh Anne Riedman

Tiny fossils found in 1.7 billion-year-old mud yield clues to the evolution of complex life

For young-Earth creationists, some of the most troublesome evidence comes in the smallest packages. Microscopic fossils preserved in ancient Australian mudstones record organisms living approximately 1.75–1.4 billion years ago — an antiquity impossible to reconcile with the few thousand years allowed by a literal reading of the biblical genealogies. These organisms were already part of aLayers of 1.7 billion-year-old sedimentary rocks, Kakadu National Park, Northern Territoryn evolving biosphere more than a billion years before the supposed “Creation Week”. Their existence presents a chronological problem that no amount of argument about the meaning of “kind” can resolve.

These fossils are the subject of a paper in Nature, by Maxwell A. Lechte and colleagues, investigating the environments inhabited by some of the earliest known eukaryotes. Eukaryotes are organisms with structurally complex cells, typically containing a nucleus and specialised internal compartments; they include animals, plants, fungi and numerous microscopic organisms. Here, “complex life” refers to cellular organisation, not to miniature animals swimming through those ancient seas. Understanding these early cells helps explain the evolutionary foundations upon which much later forms of life depended.

Glossary.

Aerobes

Organisms that use oxygen in their metabolism. Obligate aerobes require it; facultative anaerobes can grow with or without it; microaerophiles require oxygen at concentrations below those in ordinary air.

Benthic

Living on, in or close to the bottom of a sea or lake. A “benthic habit” means a bottom-dwelling way of life.

Planktonic

Living suspended in the water and drifting largely with currents, rather than inhabiting the seabed.

Bottom waters

The water immediately above the seabed. It can lack oxygen even when the surface waters contain it.

Morphological complexity

Complexity of physical form or structure. Elaborate fossil walls, ornamentation and extensions can help researchers recognise probable eukaryotes.

Palaeontological, sedimentological and geochemical analyses

Studies of fossils, sediments and their formation, and the chemical composition of geological materials, respectively. Combining them helps reconstruct both ancient organisms and their environments.

Body fossils and molecular biomarkers

Body fossils preserve remains or impressions of organisms. Molecular biomarkers are chemical traces of biological molecules that can provide evidence of ancient life even without recognisable bodies.

Proterozoic eon

The interval from approximately 2.5 billion to 539 million years ago, encompassing much of the early history of eukaryotic life.

Neoproterozoic era

The final part of the Proterozoic, approximately 1 billion to 539 million years ago. The researchers propose that eukaryotes expanded substantially into planktonic habitats during this interval.

The research also illustrates something creationist caricatures of science routinely overlook: scientists continually test their explanations against evidence. Discoveries of living eukaryotes capable of surviving without oxygen, together with evidence that ancient seas were widely oxygen-poor, had raised questions about whether the earliest eukaryotes needed oxygen at all. To investigate, the researchers turned to rock cores drilled decades ago during mineral exploration and subsequently stored in Darwin. They examined more than 12,000 microfossils and analysed the sediments and their chemistry to reconstruct the organisms’ habitats. Old collections, approached with new questions, can still yield major discoveries.

The resulting pattern was revealing. Eukaryotic fossils occurred almost exclusively in sediments deposited beneath oxygenated waters, whereas sediments from oxygen-free settings still preserved other microbial fossils. Their distribution suggests that these early eukaryotes used oxygen and probably lived on the seabed. The researchers also propose that a much later expansion into planktonic habitats helped shape subsequent diversification. This connects evolutionary history with the availability of suitable environments: the opportunities for complex organisms to flourish depended on the physical and chemical conditions around them.

This does not establish every step in the origin of the eukaryotic cell, nor demonstrate that one particular rise in oxygen directly caused its appearance. It does strengthen the evidence that oxygen availability constrained early eukaryotic habitats. The broader picture is one of evolution unfolding within a changing planet, with environmental conditions opening opportunities and imposing limits. There is no requirement here for foresight or a predetermined destination.

Creationists may welcome any suggestion that scientists are reassessing an earlier interpretation, but the revision offers them no chronological refuge. Whether these organisms inhabited the seabed or drifted in the water, and precisely how they used oxygen, are questions within an ancient evolutionary history. Reconsidering those details does not compress that history into a biblical timetable. Science advances because its explanations remain answerable to evidence; a chronology fixed in advance can survive only by refusing the evidence that contradicts it.

In the following article from The Conversation, reproduced here under a Creative Commons licence, researchers Maxwell Lechte and Leigh Anne Riedman explain what these tiny fossils reveal about the early evolution of complex life.

Published: May 21, 2026 12.08am BST

Tiny fossils found in 1.7 billion‑year‑old mud yield clues to the evolution of complex life

Drill cores of sedimentary rock which contains microscopic fossils.

Maxwell Lechte

Maxwell Lechte, University of Sydney and Leigh Anne Riedman, University of California, Santa Barbara

Stored in an open-air warehouse in tropical Darwin, Australia, are dozens of trays containing cylindrical cores of rock. They are from drill holes bored hundreds of metres below the surface by mineral exploration companies decades ago.

Some of these cores at the Northern Territory Geological Survey are mudstone – a type of sedimentary rock formed from hardened seafloor mud. The companies that drilled these cores were largely unaware that within these mudstones were fossils of microscopic organisms buried on the seafloor of an ancient inland sea that covered much of northern Australia over 1.5 billion years ago.

As our new study, published today in Nature, shows, these fossils are crucial for addressing a longstanding puzzle about the major evolutionary leap that led to all complex life on Earth: the origin of eukaryotes.

Layers of 1.7 billion-year-old sedimentary rocks, Kakadu National Park, Northern Territory.

Maxwell Lechte

Small but complex

All life on Earth can be placed into one of two types which are fundamentally different at the cellular level.

Prokaryotes (bacteria and archaea) have simple cellular organisation and are mostly single celled. Eukaryotes – including all animals, plants, algae and fungi – are very different. They have much more complicated cells featuring a nucleus and other specialised structures such as organelles which perform specific jobs.

The eukaryotic revolution transformed the planet. It led to the rise of animals and, eventually, to us. Based on observations from the genes of living organisms, it is now widely agreed that the last common ancestor of all living eukaryotes resulted from the symbiotic union of (at least) two prokaryotic microbes: an archaeon and a bacterium.

The first evidence for eukaryotic life comes in the form of these fossils of single-celled organisms. They show a level of cellular complexity not seen among prokaryotes, but common in eukaryotes.

Eukaryote fossils can be found around the world in rocks dating back at least 1.5 billion years. The fossils of the Northern Territory, the oldest of which date back to 1.75 billion years ago, are the oldest currently known eukaryote fossils globally.

But the ancient world in which early eukaryotes evolved remains shrouded in mystery. And so many fundamental aspects regarding their nature are unknown.

Oxygen – friend or foe?

Many types of bacteria can live and grow in places without oxygen. But nearly all eukaryotes alive today use oxygen for their survival. That’s because aerobic respiration – breaking down food using oxygen – provides the vast amounts of energy that complex life demands.

But the idea that oxygen has always been beneficial for all eukaryotes has come under fire in recent years. This follows the surprising discoveries of enigmatic eukaryotes that can thrive in conditions without oxygen.

There is also mounting evidence from the geological record that when eukaryotes were first evolving, oxygen was likely much scarcer. This means oxygen-free marine habitats would have been the norm. Collectively, these observations have called into question the assumption eukaryotes have depended on oxygen since their inception.

Genetic studies of living microbes belonging to groups considered closest to the ancestors of the first eukaryote can offer key insights into eukaryote ancestry. But only the fossil record can tell us about long-extinct lineages. And only geology can offer a window into the kind of world these organisms lived in.

Fossils of single-celled eukaryotic organisms with complex surface features such as extensions and plates.

Leigh Anne Riedman

More than 12,000 fossils

For our new study, we crushed up samples of the mudstone cores stored in Darwin, then dissolved them. We identified more than 12,000 fossils by analysing the organic residue left behind by this dissolution under a microscope.

We also studied the mudstones the fossils were preserved in to better understand what the environment was like when the sediments were deposited. This offered insight about the habitats in which these eukaryotes lived. And by analysing the chemistry of these mudstones, we could determine whether oxygen was present in the ancient seawater.

Our results show that eukaryote fossils were found in environments ranging from coastal mudflats to the open sea. But they were present only in samples deposited in oxygenated settings. Samples from oxygen-free environments contained only simple, prokaryotic forms.

This suggests that even the oldest known eukaryotes that lived on Earth 1.7 to 1.4 billion years ago were dependent on oxygen. These data lend support to a long-held hypothesis that oxygen played a key role in driving the evolution of early eukaryotes.

Resolving the drivers and context of the major evolutionary leap represented by early eukaryotes is one of the major outstanding questions in the life sciences. Ongoing studies of these enigmatic, ancient microfossils will no doubt tell us more about our own origins – and our place in the cosmos.
Maxwell Lechte, Research Associate in Geobiology, University of Sydney and Leigh Anne Riedman, Postdoctoral Researcher, Department of Earth Science, University of California, Santa Barbara

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.

Published by The Conversation.
Open access. (CC BY 4.0)

Abstract
The evolution of the eukaryotic cell paved the way for the emergence of all complex life on Earth. Despite its significance, the environmental context of early eukaryote evolution is largely unknown^1,2. Here we use the geological record to reconstruct the habitats of the oldest known fossil eukaryotes, approximately 1.75–1.4 billion years old. Our integrated palaeontological, sedimentological and geochemical analyses show that although fossil eukaryotes are found in samples deposited in a range of environments from coastal to offshore, they are almost entirely restricted to those from settings with oxygenated bottom waters. This distribution suggests these organisms were aerobes (obligate, facultative and/or microaerophilic) and, given their size and morphological complexity, probably possessed mitochondria. Furthermore, their near absence from otherwise fossiliferous anoxic samples suggests a benthic habit, as planktonic eukaryotes would be expected to be present in both oxic and anoxic samples. We propose that eukaryotes were largely restricted to oxic benthic habitats for much of the Proterozoic eon, only expanding into planktonic habitats during the Neoproterozoic era (1–0.54 billion years ago). This late ecological expansion could account for the mismatch between the appearance of eukaryotic body fossils and molecular biomarkers³ and explain the stepwise increase in eukaryote diversity during the Neoproterozoic era⁴.

Lechte, M.A., Riedman, L.A., Porter, S.M. et al.
Early fossil eukaryotes were benthic aerobes.
Nature 655, 670–675 (2026). https://doi.org/10.1038/s41586-026-10533-4

©2026 Springer Nature Ltd.
Reprinted under the terms of s60 of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.

For young-Earth creationism, the fundamental problem remains the chronology. These microscopic organisms inhabited Earth more than a billion years before the supposed biblical creation. Debates about their metabolism or preferred habitat cannot make that immense span of time disappear. There is no evidence-based reconciliation between this geological history and a world only a few thousand years old; preserving the latter requires rejecting the former.

The study also illustrates how science progresses. Researchers revisit specimens, question assumptions and combine different kinds of evidence to distinguish between competing explanations. Whether early eukaryotes depended on oxygen is a question to investigate, not a doctrine to defend. Revising an interpretation in response to evidence strengthens our understanding; it does not render every alternative explanation equally credible.

What emerges is a history in which the evolution and distribution of complex life were constrained by environmental conditions. Oxygen availability helped determine where these early eukaryotes could flourish, while subsequent ecological expansion offered further opportunities for diversification. This does not mean that oxygen alone explains the origin of complex cells, but it places their history firmly within the workings of a changing natural world.

There is no need to imagine those ancient seas being prepared with humans in mind. Evolution has no foresight: organisms survive and reproduce under the conditions they encounter, and their descendants inherit the consequences. These tiny fossils preserve evidence of that long, contingent history — a history we can reconstruct by examining the rocks, rather than insisting that the rocks conform to an ancient creation story.

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Creationism Refuted - How Life Could Have Started On Earth 4.33 Billion Years Before 'Creation Week'

AI-generated impression of the Hadean Bombardment

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New Study Pinpoints When Early Earth May Have Become Ready for Life’s Chemistry - Planetary Science Institute

For creationists who depend on gaps in scientific knowledge, research into the origin of life presents a recurring difficulty: scientists keep finding ways to investigate those gaps. One question is when the early Earth became sufficiently stable for the chemistry preceding life to persist. Producing potentially useful molecules would have achieved little if repeated impacts then destroyed them. Before life could gain a foothold, its chemical ingredients needed somewhere they could survive.

A new study by Oleg Abramov and colleagues, published in Nature Communications investigates that problem using a three-dimensional model of impact heating. The researchers identify approximately 4.33 billion years ago as a particularly favourable time for persistent prebiotic chemistry. That places the proposed opportunity billions of years before the entire universe supposedly appeared in the chronology of Young-Earth creationism.

The emerging picture scarcely resembles a world prepared as a comfortable home for living things. Early Earth endured bombardment by asteroids, comets and leftover planetary building blocks. As that bombardment declined, regions of the shallow crust could remain cool enough for fragile molecules to persist. Around 4.4 billion years ago, the simulations begin to show environments that escaped subsequent reheating above the study’s specified threshold.

There is an interesting complication: impacts could also help create opportunities for life’s chemistry. Water circulating through heated, fractured rock can produce hydrothermal environments with sources of chemical energy. The researchers therefore sought an overlap between enduring cooler regions and continuing hydrothermal activity. Their proposed favourable window represents a changing balance between destructive heating and potentially useful geological activity, with no foresight required.

The distinction between opportunity and occurrence matters. This study does not demonstrate that life began 4.33 billion years ago, nor establish that an “RNA world” actually existed then. It constrains the thermal conditions under which such a proposed stage could have persisted. The date also depends on assumptions about bombardment: a lower estimate of the incoming mass moves the favourable window earlier, towards 4.4 billion years ago.

For creationism, the difficulty extends beyond the enormous timescale. An unanswered question about life’s beginnings is being broken down into physical conditions that researchers can calculate, compare and challenge. Uncertainty remains, but uncertainty supplies questions for further investigation; it supplies no evidence for a supernatural designer. Here, another part of the origin-of-life problem becomes a tractable question about the history of a changing planet.

Refuting Creationism - How the Earliest Cells Evolved Not Once But Twice - 4 Billion Years Before 'Creation Week'

Shared metal-catalysed metabolic network within a primordial hydrothermal vent, diverging into the bacterial and archaeal lineages.

AI-generated image (ChatGPT 5.6 Sol)

Early Evolution of Life: Publication in Science Advances

A paper recently published in Science Advances by an international team led by researchers at Heinrich Heine University Düsseldorf (HHU) will make disappointing reading for any creationist with enough courage to read a scientific paper—especially those pinning their hopes on science never closing their favourite gap: the gap between geochemistry and the first living systems.

Leaving that gap permanently open would allow them to declare, “God did it!”, without providing a scrap of supporting evidence or explaining how their preferred god supposedly made chemistry and physics behave in ways that they could not have done unaided. This combination of the god-of-the-gaps argument and a false dichotomy—either science already has a complete explanation, or magic must have been responsible—is standard creationist fare in the absence of positive evidence for a creator.

The new research does not, as some headlines might suggest, show that abiogenesis occurred twice independently. Instead, it presents evidence that the genetic code and a core metabolic network had a single origin before the ancestral lineage divided into Bacteria and Archaea, but that the two lineages subsequently completed the transition to free-living cells independently. As senior author William F. Martin expressed it, the findings point to “one origin of the genetic code, but two origins of life”—with “life” here referring specifically to autonomous, free-living cellular life.

The findings therefore do not overturn universal common ancestry. Both Bacteria and Archaea still trace their ancestry to the last universal common ancestor, or LUCA. What the researchers propose is that LUCA was not yet a fully independent cell equipped with enzymes for every essential metabolic reaction. It remained partly dependent on inorganic catalysts supplied by the hydrothermal environment in which its metabolism had evolved. Only after the bacterial and archaeal lineages had diverged did each independently evolve the remaining enzymes needed to become free-living.

Creationism Refuted - How The Building Blocks Of Life Can be Made Without Magic

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Cosmic dust analogue seen through a microscope created by experiment by Linda Losurdo.

This student made cosmic dust in her lab. What she found could help us understand how life started on Earth - The University of Sydney

Creationist objections to abiogenesis often smuggle in the long-discredited idea of vitalism: the belief that living matter contains some special ingredient or “vital force” absent from non-living matter. This appears to lie behind the familiar creationist refrain that “life cannot come from non-life”, as though “life” were a substance that must be added to matter by a supernatural agent.

The word “life”, however, is rarely defined in this argument. Scientists can devise operational definitions for particular purposes, but life is not a single substance possessed by some molecules and absent from others. It is a collection of properties displayed by sufficiently organised chemical systems. By leaving the term undefined, creationists turn their assertion into a slogan that can neither be tested nor falsified.

The distinction between organic and inorganic chemistry is useful, but partly conventional and historical. Organic chemistry deals broadly with carbon compounds, although some carbon-containing substances—including carbon dioxide, carbon monoxide and carbonates—are traditionally classified as inorganic. There is no fundamental physical boundary between the two categories: both obey precisely the same laws of physics, chemistry and quantum mechanics.

Carbon’s extraordinary chemical versatility follows from its atomic structure. A carbon atom has six protons and six electrons, four of which are valence electrons in its outer shell. Its small size and ability to form strong covalent bonds with itself and with elements such as hydrogen, oxygen and nitrogen allow it to form stable chains, rings, branches and extensive molecular networks. Depending on how it is bonded, carbon can adopt tetrahedral, trigonal-planar or linear arrangements and can form single, double or triple bonds. All this follows from quantum chemistry; no vital spark, magical ingredient or special rule is required.

None of that proves that the origin of life was inevitable, and science does not yet possess a complete account of every stage of abiogenesis. What it does show is that there is no known chemical or physical barrier preventing non-living chemistry from becoming progressively more complex. Under suitable conditions, chemical systems can acquire such properties as compartmentalisation, catalysis and molecular replication. Once populations of replicating systems existed with heritable variation, natural selection could favour those that survived longer, reproduced more reliably and used available resources more efficiently.

One important question is where the organic raw materials involved in this prebiotic chemistry came from. Some could have formed on the early Earth, but organic compounds are also widespread throughout the Solar System and interstellar space. They have been detected in comets and asteroids and regularly occur in meteorites. Earth may therefore have received substantial quantities of organic material from several extraterrestrial sources. This raises another scientific question: what natural chemical and physical processes produced and modified that material in space?

Linda Losurdo, a PhD candidate in materials and plasma physics in the School of Physics at the University of Sydney, Australia, has investigated part of that question with her supervisor, Professor David McKenzie. They recreated some of the energetic, near-vacuum conditions associated with stars and other astrophysical environments inside glass tubes. After evacuating the tubes, they introduced nitrogen, carbon dioxide and acetylene and subjected the mixture to an electrical potential of about 10,000 volts for approximately an hour, producing a plasma known as a glow discharge.

Abiogenesis News - Origin Of Complex (Eukaryote) Cells - Association With Mitochondria.

Beginnings of symbiosis

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A Break in a Longstanding Mystery about Origin of Complex Life | College of Natural Sciences

Here are a couple of papers published today that deal with related aspects of the origins of complex (eukaryotic) cells — all living organisms apart from Bacteria, Archaea and viruses (the prokaryotes). There is little doubt in biology that eukaryotes evolved from symbiotic associations between prokaryotes, despite the regular creationist straw man claim that scientists are naïve enough — or somehow brainwashed by evil “Darwinists” — to believe that the first complex cell arose spontaneously in a single step so fantastically improbable that magical creation becomes an almost plausible alternative.

In reality, as these two papers demonstrate, the precise details of how these symbiotic associations arose remain matters of active research and debate. I will deal with the second paper in a separate blog post. This post concerns the paper by scientists from The University of Texas at Austin, published in *Nature*, which addresses the question of how the oxygen-dependent bacterium that became the mitochondrion came together with a presumed anaerobic (oxygen-intolerant) archaeon, given that the two would not be expected to occupy the same environment.

The team propose that this apparent problem may be resolved by evidence that some archaea of the Asgard group — which today live primarily in the deep sea and other oxygen-free environments — can use, or at least tolerate, oxygen.

The Asgard archaea most closely related to eukaryotic cells are found in shallow coastal sediments or floating in the marine column. Crucially, they possess metabolic pathways that use oxygen. It is therefore possible that their ancestors did as well, meaning they could have cohabited with the bacterial ancestors of mitochondria.

Abiogenesis News - A Small Self-Copying RNA Molecule That Could Easily Arise Spontaneously

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Bridging the gap from chemistry to life: discovery of a tiny RNA that can copy itself | MRC Laboratory of Molecular Biology

A paper by Philipp Holliger’s group in the MRC Laboratory of Molecular Biology’s Protein and Nucleic Acid Chemistry (PNAC) Division, Cambridge, UK, announces the discovery of a self-replicating small RNA molecule that can also synthesise its complementary strand. It was published yesterday in Science Advances.

This effectively resolves one of the few remaining major questions in explanations of abiogenesis: the origin of a simple self-catalysing replicator. Such a molecule must have existed at the very beginning of life’s emergence, and for decades RNA has been the leading candidate, because it can function both as an enzyme and as an information store — capable of copying that information repeatedly, provided there is a supply of nucleotides from which to build itself.

The question of where such a replicator first arose — in Darwin’s “warm little pond”, at a deep-ocean hydrothermal vent, or on wave-splashed rocks providing a steady supply of raw materials — is secondary to the more fundamental question of what could have initiated self-replication in the first place. Once replication began, occasional copying errors would inevitably generate variation, giving natural selection something to act upon. From that point, it is difficult to avoid the conclusion that progressively more efficient replicators would emerge, eventually dominating and monopolising the available resources.

Although various RNA molecules are known that can also act as catalysts (ribozymes), most are far too large to self-catalyse, or plausibly to have arisen spontaneously under prebiotic conditions. This newly discovered RNA molecule, at a mere 45 nucleotides long, neatly plugs that gap.

Creationists will no doubt reach for their usual “astronomical improbability” trope, but it only works by assuming the wrong problem. It treats abiogenesis as if one exact, predetermined sequence had to assemble by perfectly random chance in a single step. Real chemistry is biased, real environments concentrate and cycle materials, and—most importantly—the target was never one unique sequence but any of a potentially vast number of small RNAs with even modest replicative activity.

Once replication begins, copying errors generate variation and natural selection can take over, amplifying the better replicators. In short: the relevant question is not the odds of one bullseye in 4⁴⁵, but how quickly chemistry can stumble into a broad foothold and let Darwinian processes do what they inevitably do.

Abiogenesis News - The Genes That Predate Life

Scientists describe a window into evolution before the tree of life | Oberlin College and Conservatory | EurekAlert!

In a paper published recently in the journal Cell Genomics, scientists Aaron Goldman (Oberlin College), Greg Fournier (MIT), and Betül Kaçar (University of Wisconsin–Madison) describe how they were able to study evolutionary history even before the last universal common ancestor of all living things (LUCA) emerged, and discovered that some of the genes associated with LUCA may in fact predate LUCA itself.

Creationists determined to misrepresent the process of abiogenesis often present it as a ridiculous parody in which a fully complex cell is supposed to have spontaneously assembled out of inorganic atoms and molecules. This straw-man caricature is far easier to attack than what science actually proposes: that the first population of self-replicating proto-cells arose through gradual chemical and evolutionary processes within a large and diverse population.

Within such a population, variation would inevitably occur, and whatever produced the most copies of itself would come to dominate. One of the earliest characteristics to emerge would have been rapid replication, because in a vast population with generation times measured in minutes, even “million-to-one” mutations are not rare events — they occur thousands of times a day. Under such conditions, what creationists portray as wildly improbable becomes not only plausible, but effectively inevitable over time.

Several independent evolutionary pathways could also have developed in parallel: RNA molecules coding for particular enzymes, ribosomes assembling from self-catalysing RNA, and primitive membranes forming across which chemical energy gradients could arise. Only once these components were already present could they come together within an enclosing membrane to form the first true prokaryotic cells.

The research team led by Aaron Goldman has now developed a method for determining which genes were likely present in LUCA, and which must already have been available to be incorporated when LUCA first emerged. In other words, some genes appear to predate LUCA itself, pushing parts of evolutionary history even deeper into the pre-cellular past.

What Was LUCA — and What Came Before It? The Last Universal Common Ancestor (LUCA) is often misunderstood, especially by creationists who portray it as the very first living organism. In reality, LUCA was not the origin of life, nor the first cell, nor some single creature that suddenly appeared fully formed.

LUCA is simply the most recent population of organisms from which all life alive today ultimately descends — bacteria, archaea, and eukaryotes alike. Crucially, LUCA already possessed a level of biochemical sophistication. Most researchers agree it likely had:

• a genetic code based on RNA and DNA
• ribosomes capable of translating RNA into proteins
• enzymes for metabolism and replication
• membrane structures maintaining internal chemistry
• the ability to exploit chemical energy gradients

This means LUCA could not have been the beginning of life. Instead, it must have been the product of a long evolutionary history that preceded it.

Pre-LUCA Evolution: A World of Competing Proto-Life

Before LUCA, early Earth was almost certainly home to a diverse population of simpler self-replicating systems — sometimes called proto-cells or pre-cellular life. These were not fully modern organisms, but chemical systems capable of reproduction, variation, and selection.

Rather than a single miraculous event, abiogenesis is best understood as an extended evolutionary process in which:

• self-replicating molecules competed for resources
• advantageous variants spread through populations
• metabolic pathways evolved gradually
• membranes formed to enclose and stabilise reactions
• genetic and protein machinery became increasingly integrated

LUCA represents the point at which one lineage became the common ancestor of everything that survived, not the moment life began.

Genes Older Than LUCA

What makes the new research so significant is the finding that some genes associated with LUCA appear to be even older — suggesting that early evolutionary innovations were already circulating in the pre-LUCA world and later became incorporated into the first universal ancestor.

This is exactly what evolutionary theory predicts: life did not begin with a fully formed cell, but with populations of evolving systems, long before anything resembling modern biology existed.

Their methodology is explained further in a press release from Oberlin College, via EurekAlert!.

Abiogenesis News - How a Deadly Poison Could Have Created Pre-Biotic Organic Molecules

Frozen hydrogen cyanide ‘cobwebs’ offer clues to origin of life - American Chemical Society

Dedicated creationists will need to find yet another way to dismiss new research by three scientists from the Department of Chemistry and Chemical Engineering at Chalmers University of Technology in Gothenburg, Sweden. Their work shows that, under the right conditions, the deadly poison hydrogen cyanide (HCN) could have provided a medium in which pre-biotic organic molecules accumulated on the early Earth. The findings have been published in the journal ACS Central Science.

The difficulty this presents for creationists arises largely from their habitual black-and-white thinking. Abiogenesis must, in their view, either have occurred via some fully specified, preconceived mechanism or be declared “impossible”. Since the only process they are prepared to accept is supernatural intervention by a magic creator, the conclusion is predetermined: any natural explanation must be rejected out of hand.

That claim, however, is trivially easy to refute. Assertions of impossibility collapse as soon as a single plausible natural mechanism is demonstrated. It is not necessary to establish beyond doubt that a particular hypothetical process is exactly what happened on the early Earth; it is sufficient to show that such a process could have occurred without violating known chemistry or physics.

What the Gothenburg team have demonstrated is that, when frozen, the surfaces of hydrogen cyanide crystals become highly reactive and can catalyse chemical reactions that are not possible at higher temperatures. These reactions could have triggered a cascade of further processes, ultimately producing some of the molecular building blocks of proto-cells.

Nor do pre-biotic chemicals necessarily have to originate on Earth itself. Space is also a viable candidate environment: hydrogen cyanide is abundant in interstellar space, as is water, and the low temperatures required for these crystals to form are commonplace. In the presence of water, HCN can polymerise and give rise to amino acids and nucleobases.

Creationism Refuted - Scientists Show What Earth Was Like When Life Got started - 3.5 Billion Years Before 'Creation Week'

Ancient African bedrock reveals the violent beginnings of life on our blue planet

One reliable way to recognise that the Bible is the product of ancient ignorance is simply to compare its claims with what science has since revealed. Nowhere is this more apparent than in Genesis, which turns out to be a ludicrously simplistic attempt to explain the origins of the universe and life on Earth. Its compressed timescale cannot possibly accommodate what we now know about the age of the universe, the age of our planet, the deep history of life, or—most conspicuously—the emergence of human cultures and the migration of humans across every continent except Antarctica, as revealed by the archaeological record.

The gap between biblical mythology and reality is so vast that it cannot plausibly be rescued as allegory or metaphor, and the evidence continues to accumulate relentlessly, with nothing being discovered that remotely validates the biblical account. The year 2025 ended badly for creationism with the discovery of a 37-million-year-old transitional snake fossil from southern England, and 2026 has begun no better. A new book, The Oldest Rocks on Earth, by Simon Lamb, Associate Professor of Geophysics at Victoria University of Wellington, describes the surface conditions on Earth when life first emerged more than 3.5 billion years ago—conditions utterly incompatible with the biblical creation narrative. The research behind this book is summarised in an article in The Conversation, also by Associate Professor Lamb. That article is reproduced here under a Creative Commons licence, reformatted for stylistic consistency.

Ancient African bedrock reveals the violent beginnings of life on our blue planet

Simon Lamb, Te Herenga Waka — Victoria University of Wellington

You have probably seen the images of the surface of Mars, beamed back by NASA’s rovers. What if there were a time machine capable of roaming Earth during its remote geological past, perhaps even going right back to its beginnings, beaming back pictures of similar quality?

This is not science fiction. In remote corners of the world, geologists have found tiny relics of Earth’s very ancient surface.

I have been part of this scientific endeavour, looking at the treasure trove of information in the bedrock of the Makhonjwa Mountains in South Africa and the adjacent small kingdom of Eswatini.

These rocks reach back more than three quarters of the way through our planet’s long history of nearly 4.6 billion years. In my new book, The Oldest Rocks on Earth, I describe the graphic images “beamed back” by this geological time machine.

Beneath the remote and rugged landscape of the Makhonjwa Mountains, in Eswatini, is a bedrock that holds a record of Earth’s surface from 3.2 to 3.5 billion years ago, when our planet was about a quarter of the way through its history.

Copyright: © Tony Ferrar Source

World of oceans

The ancient rocks reveal a world with extensive oceans and intense volcanic activity on the sea floor.

Deep beneath the crust, Earth was much hotter than today, giving rise to an unusual white-hot magma, rich in elements from its interior. Huge volumes of super-heated water continually gushed out of underwater cracks, building up chimneys of valuable metals. And life was thriving around these undersea vents.

Volcanic islands rose up from the ocean depths. These were dangerous places. Pools of hot bubbling mud dotted their shores, and clouds of volcanic ash periodically exploded from volcanic craters.

Life was already there, forming microbial mats in the sheltered nearshore waters.

Periodically, large earthquakes violently shook the bedrock, triggering submarine avalanches that cascaded down into the deep ocean, creating vast jumbles of rock on the sea floor. Giant asteroid impacts disturbed this world, but crucially, did not extinguish it.

Deep-seated forces were pushing up new land, creating the early continents.

Ocean waves moved back and forth on sandy beaches along coastlines with bays, lagoons, inlets and estuaries, with tides similar to those today.

During floods, large rivers brought muddy water from the continental interior. Farther in the distance, their headwaters drained a mountainous terrain, often enveloped in thick cloud.

It was a blue planet because, like today, the oceans scattered light in the blue part of the colour spectrum.

But the atmosphere contained a lethal cocktail of gases, including high concentrations of methane and carbon dioxide. These greenhouse gases kept the surface at the right temperature for liquid water, at a time when astrophysicists calculate the Sun was much weaker. But there was no oxygen.

The earliest life forms were anaerobic microbes, although brightly coloured – pink or purple have been proposed.

Oceania today

Oceania, in the southwestern Pacific, may illustrate best what this early world was like. Here, the ocean is peppered with volcanic islands and small continents, rocked by great earthquakes where tectonic plates rub against each other. There are even clues to how life began.

The 2022 eruption of the Hunga volcano, near Tonga, created a mushroom cloud of ash that burst out of the ocean and reached up into space with an estimated energy of a 60-megaton atomic bomb. It generated more than 200,000 lightning strikes and left behind a deep underwater crater filled with a chemical soup derived from numerous underwater hot vents.

Experiments show that lightning strikes can trigger the synthesis of basic organic molecules needed by living organisms. Millions of Hunga-like eruptions on early Earth would have created myriad opportunities to kick start the chemistry of life in underwater volcanic craters – life was born out of extreme geological violence.

Staying blue

Going back in time beyond the Makhonjwa Mountains, we still find evidence for oceans, life and, I argue, plate tectonics. Earth became blue within the first tenth of its history.

Mars and Venus may have started this way, too. But our planet uniquely lies in the so-called Goldilocks Zone, receiving just the right amount of solar energy to avoid becoming a boiling Venusian hell or freezing Martian world.

It is also big enough to have a magnetic field and pull of gravity sufficient to retain its atmosphere. And right at the start, a dramatic collision with a Mars-sized asteroid spalled off our Moon, stabilising Earth’s spin axis so that day and night were less extreme.

Finally, the biochemistry of living organisms may have played a key role in keeping Earth this way by helping the bedrock absorb greenhouse gases in the face of a steadily warming Sun.

We must not be the first to let Earth lose its distinctive life-giving blue, a colour so wonderfully referred to in the Siswati language of Eswatini as luhlata lwesibhakabhaka, literally “green like the sky”.

Simon Lamb, Associate Professor in Geophysics, Te Herenga Waka — Victoria University of Wellington

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.

Published by The Conversation.
Open access. (CC BY 4.0)

What emerges from this work is not a minor disagreement over interpretation, nor a gap that can be papered over with metaphor or selective reading. The world described by geology, geochemistry and planetary science is fundamentally incompatible with the universe imagined by the authors of Genesis. Earth was not a gentle, pre-prepared garden awaiting life, but a violent, unstable planet shaped by impacts, volcanism and relentless geological recycling over billions of years. Life did not appear suddenly by decree, but clawed its way into existence under conditions that would have been lethal to almost anything alive today.

This matters because creationism depends on the claim that its sacred text offers a privileged insight into reality. Yet when examined against the physical evidence locked into Earth’s oldest rocks, Genesis is not merely wrong in detail—it is wrong in kind. Its authors had no conception of deep time, planetary formation, plate tectonics, or the chemical and physical constraints under which life emerged. Their account reflects the worldview of Bronze Age pastoral societies, not hidden wisdom awaiting modern confirmation.

As discoveries like these continue to accumulate, the creationist position becomes ever more untenable. There is no convergence, no narrowing of the gap, no sense in which science is “catching up” with scripture. Instead, each new insight into Earth’s early history widens the chasm between myth and reality. The Bible does not describe the world we inhabit, the planet on which life evolved, or the processes that made our existence possible—and no amount of reinterpretation can change that.

Refuting Creationism - Microbes That Create Life From Non-Life

Mud volcano

Fig. 9: Schematic of microbial succession and biogeochemical processes in serpentinite mud at the Mariana forearc.
This schematic depicts lipid biomarker transitions from pelagic sediment communities to extremophiles adapted to high pH and redox conditions in serpentinite mud. The Mariana forearc biosphere is fueled by alkaline serpentinization fluids enriched in H₂, CH₄, DIC, and organic acids, sustaining specialized microbial communities. Lipid and stable carbon isotope data reveal a shift from relict methanogenic archaea, likely engaged in hydrogenotrophic methanogenesis, to a later ANME-SRB community mediating anaerobic oxidation of methane (AOM). Changes in substrate availability likely drove this transition. Distinct lipid signatures, including unsaturated diethers, acyclic GDGTs, and ether-based glycolipids, highlight adaptations to pH stress, phosphate limitation, and fluctuating redox conditions. The presence of in-situ branched GDGTs suggests previously uncharacterized bacterial communities persisting in these ultra-oligotrophic conditions. The Mariana forearc serpentinite biosphere, shaped by episodic fluid flow and substrate shifts, provides insights into deep-sea subsurface habitability. DIC = dissolved inorganic carbon, ANME anaerobic methanotrophic archaea, SRB sulfate-reducing bacteria, AOM anaerobic oxidation of methane, GDGT glycerol dialkyl glycerol tetraether.

Kumawat, P., Albers, E., Bach, W. et al. (2025).

Fats provide clues to life at its limits in the deep sea

Researchers at MARUM – Bremen University’s Centre for Marine Environmental Sciences – have made a discovery, just published open access in the journal Communications Earth & Environment, which, properly understood, should make depressing reading for creationists.

They have found living organisms both on and within the ocean floor, surviving in conditions where normal life would be impossible. These microorganisms inhabit mud volcanoes with a pH of 14, metabolising hydrogen and carbon to form methane by drawing energy from minerals in the surrounding rock. In other words, they live entirely without oxygen and with almost no organic matter, synthesising all they need from inorganic sources.

Informed creationists will recognise that these organisms directly refute their frequent assertion that life cannot arise from non-life — because producing life from non-life is precisely what these microorganisms are doing.

This also contradicts the biblical claim that all living things were created for the benefit of humans, since there is no conceivable way these organisms could serve any human purpose. Of course, to be fair, the authors of the Bible were completely ignorant of microorganisms, deep-ocean mud volcanoes, and chemosynthetic metabolism. They could only attempt to explain the larger creatures that lived in the limited region around their homes in the Canaanite hills.

And, as any informed creationist should also understand, these are exactly the sort of extreme conditions that biologists believe may have fostered the emergence of the earliest living organisms during the origin of life on Earth — once again undermining any claim that abiogenesis is impossible.