A digital representation illustrating how LUCA was already under attack from viruses even at 4.2 billion years ago.
Science Graphic Design
Contrary to the Bible's laughable model of a 10,000-year-old universe consisting of a small flat planet with a dome over it, containing nothing that was unknown to the Bronze Age hill farmers whose best guess became part of the Hebrew creation myth, scientists at the University of Bristol have shown that the last universal common ancestor of all living organisms (LUCA) had evolved within 400 million years of Earth forming some 4.6 billion years ago.
They have calculated that LUCA was about as complex as a prokaryote, had already evolved an immune system and was engaged in an arms race with viruses.
