6 ms·

Scientists find 3.7B-year-old fossil, oldest yet

136 points by Cozumel 10y ago

tempestn 10y ago
The discoverer of the previous oldest fossil (3.48B years) suggests that this find may not be organic in origin. Would be nice if other experts had been interviewed on that possibility, since there could potentially be some bias there. Edit: perhaps "organic" was a poor choice of words. My meaning was that she disputed the claim that the artifact is in fact a fossil created by life, and suggested that it might be a geological formation of some sort instead.
- Practicality 10y ago
  I am not sure what the relevance would be. Are you using the term "organic" as in biological, or as in carbon-based? In either case, what would it mean if it wasn't organic?
  - scott_s 10y ago
    I believe tempestn is referring to the end of the article, where the scientist who found the previously oldest fossil says it may not actually be a fossil: The dating seems about right, said Abigail Allwood, a NASA astrobiologist who found the previous oldest fossil, from 3.48 billion years ago, in Australia. But Allwood said she is not completely convinced that what VanKranendonk's team found once was alive. She said the evidence wasn't conclusive enough that it was life and not a geologic quirk. "It would be nice to have more evidence, but in these rocks that's a lot to ask," Allwood said in an email.
    - tempestn 10y ago
      Right, yes. I don't know anything about this person, but certainly there are people out there who would be biased against having their little place in history overshadowed by a new discovery, perhaps even unconsciously. Not saying she is biased, just that it would be nice to see the opinions of some other experts, not involved in the discovery. In fact, even if it were a completely unbiased third-party opinion it would still be nice to have more than one, since as a lay-person I'm currently left with no idea how likely it is that this is in fact evidence of early life.
      - deleted 10y ago
        [deleted]
  - pyre 10y ago
    In the article the term "organic" isn't used at all: > The dating seems about right, said Abigail Allwood , a NASA > astrobiologist who found the previous oldest fossil, from > 3.48 billion years ago, in Australia. But Allwood said she is > not completely convinced that what VanKranendonk's team found > once was alive. She said the evidence wasn't conclusive enough > that it was life and not a geologic quirk. > > "It would be nice to have more evidence, but in these rocks > that's a lot to ask," Allwood said in an email.
  - yesbabyyes 10y ago
    While it has already been cleared out, I would just like to point to this, from wiktionary: organic ‎(comparative more organic, superlative most organic) 1. (biology) Pertaining to or derived from living organisms.
    - scoot 10y ago
      "cleared up", but yes, this is exactly what I took from OP's use of the term 'organic'.
      - Practicality 10y ago
        I suppose I was hopeful that it was silicon based life :)
- mturmon 10y ago
  That previous fossil-finder (Abigail Allwood) wrote the overview article (http://www.nature.com/nature/journal/vaop/ncurrent/full/nature19429.html http://www.nature.com/nature/journal/vaop/ncurrent/full/natu...) introducing the Nature paper that is the subject of the OP. Her overview emphasizes the significance of this finding for exo-life, linking the finding to recent discoveries of ancient water, lakes, and streamflows on Mars, rather than the caveats. The more general news-based article in Nature (http://www.nature.com/news/claims-of-earth-s-oldest-fossils-tantalize-researchers-1.20506 http://www.nature.com/news/claims-of-earth-s-oldest-fossils-...) has several experts checking in with caveats.
  - tempestn 10y ago
    Perfect, thanks.
- zipwitch 10y ago
  Or perhaps made from some strange matter, alien to understanding? (What does a fossilized Great Old One look like, anyway? Would it still be alive?)
- deleted 10y ago
  [deleted]
deleted 10y ago
[deleted]
mpnagle 10y ago
hail helix
swayvil 10y ago
3.5 billion years ago the skies were orange, the oceans were green and the land was black.
- mwpmaybe 10y ago
  And men were men, and women liked it!
  - mwpmaybe 10y ago
    OK, maybe I should have gone with, "And men were real men, women were real women, and small, furry creatures from Alpha Centauri were real small, furry creatures from Alpha Centauri."
- dredmorbius 10y ago
  It was a true iron age. Do you have any refs on the Earth's appearance at the time?
  - andrewflnr 10y ago
    It's at the bottom of TFA. First I've seen it, too.
    - dredmorbius 10y ago
      Ah, missed that, thanks.
- peter303 10y ago
  Robert Hazen recent book on Earth assigns a distinctive color to each major geologic era- red, black, blue, green, white ...
usaphp 10y ago
Can someone explain me how do they determine the age?
- CodeSheikh 10y ago
  Carbon dating https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Radiocarbon_dating https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Radiocarbon_dating https://www.boundless.com/biology/textbooks/boundless-biology-textbook/evolution-and-the-origin-of-species-18/evidence-of-evolution-129/carbon-dating-and-estimating-fossil-age-520-13098/ https://www.boundless.com/biology/textbooks/boundless-biolog...
  - cjslep 10y ago
    No, carbon-14 dating doesn't even reliably hit 1 million years ago, let alone 3 billion. Edit: Even your Wiki link cites 500,000 years.
  - dkurth 10y ago
    According to that boundless.com link, "The half-life of carbon-14 is 5,730 years, so carbon dating is only relevant for dating fossils less than 60,000 years old."
  - usaphp 10y ago
    But from the Wikipedia about radiocarbon method: "Radiocarbon dating is a radiometric dating method that uses (14C) to determine the age of carbonaceous materials up to about 60,000 years old."
- slezakattack 10y ago
  The most well-known way of determining fossil age is carbon dating[0]. [0] http://science.howstuffworks.com/environmental/earth/geology/carbon-14.htm http://science.howstuffworks.com/environmental/earth/geology...
- acidburnNSA 10y ago
  Using radiogenic isotope geology. Carbon dating only works on very recent things (up to a few tens of thousands of years). For older things like the earth and these fossils, slower-ticking radiometric clocks (like Uranium-Lead clocks) must be used. There was a great COSMOS episode discussing the history of it [1] but the fascinating math and science behind it is better explained for the layperson in [2]. [1] http://channel.nationalgeographic.com/cosmos-a-spacetime-odyssey/episodes/the-clean-room/ http://channel.nationalgeographic.com/cosmos-a-spacetime-ody... [2] https://whatisnuclear.com/physics/age_of_earth.html https://whatisnuclear.com/physics/age_of_earth.html
nxzero 10y ago
As a little context, the oldest known minerals on Earth are a 4.4 billion-year-old and Earth itself is 4.543 billion years-old.
deleted 10y ago
[deleted]
dredmorbius 10y ago
In a related bit of paleogeology, a large share of iron ore, particularly banded iron formations (BIF) date from about this time -- they're typically about 1.2 - 3.7 billion years old, and date to the periods of early life, a large amount of free molecular (unoxidised) iron, a methane atmosphere, and early cyanobacteria whose metabolic waste product was oxygen. This combined with free dissolved iron in early oceans, precipitated out as iron oxides, and left the deposits now mined for ores. Exhaustion of the dissolved iron resource lead to a rise in atmospheric oxygen (poisonous to the cyanobacteria), a depletion of the methane which served to warm the Earth under the light of a much cooler sun, and resulted in a half-billion year "Snowball Earth" period -- an earlier form of overzealous biological organisms triggering catastrophic environmental pollution and climate change. I find it fascinating to think about how and where minerals came from (iron originates in stellar fusion, it's the low point of the atomic potential curve, and hence you cannot fuse nor fission iron nuclei to release energy), and how they came to be organised in deposits. Many minerals are concentrated through prior biological activity -- iron, limestone, and of course, coal and petroleum. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Banded_iron_formation https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Banded_iron_formation (Edit: Corrected erronious initial explanation of iron deposition -- precipitation, not biological binding.)
sattoshi 10y ago
They measured a foot and the head of a mammoth to magnitudes of difference already. You can't measure stuff that old. They almost decide how old they want it to be.
okket 10y ago
FWIW, Ed Yong: The newly discovered rocks suggest that life arose very quickly after the Earth was formed. http://www.theatlantic.com/science/archive/2016/08/the-worlds-oldest-fossils-are-37-billion-years-old/498056/ http://www.theatlantic.com/science/archive/2016/08/the-world...
hownottowrite 10y ago
Side note: Interesting paper on mathematical model often used in analyzing the patterns in stromatolites and other growing interfaces: the Kardar–Parisi–Zhang equation. "Pattern formation in stromatolites: insights from mathematical modeling" http://rsif.royalsocietypublishing.org/content/9/70/1051 http://rsif.royalsocietypublishing.org/content/9/70/1051

136 points by Cozumel 10y ago

The discoverer of the previous oldest fossil (3.48B years) suggests that this find may not be organic in origin. Would be nice if other experts had been interviewed on that possibility, since there could potentially be some bias there. Edit: perhaps "organic" was a poor choice of words. My meaning was that she disputed the claim that the artifact is in fact a fossil created by life, and suggested that it might be a geological formation of some sort instead.

Practicality 10y ago
I am not sure what the relevance would be. Are you using the term "organic" as in biological, or as in carbon-based? In either case, what would it mean if it wasn't organic?
- scott_s 10y ago
  I believe tempestn is referring to the end of the article, where the scientist who found the previously oldest fossil says it may not actually be a fossil: The dating seems about right, said Abigail Allwood, a NASA astrobiologist who found the previous oldest fossil, from 3.48 billion years ago, in Australia. But Allwood said she is not completely convinced that what VanKranendonk's team found once was alive. She said the evidence wasn't conclusive enough that it was life and not a geologic quirk. "It would be nice to have more evidence, but in these rocks that's a lot to ask," Allwood said in an email.
  - tempestn 10y ago
    Right, yes. I don't know anything about this person, but certainly there are people out there who would be biased against having their little place in history overshadowed by a new discovery, perhaps even unconsciously. Not saying she is biased, just that it would be nice to see the opinions of some other experts, not involved in the discovery. In fact, even if it were a completely unbiased third-party opinion it would still be nice to have more than one, since as a lay-person I'm currently left with no idea how likely it is that this is in fact evidence of early life.
    - deleted 10y ago
      [deleted]
- pyre 10y ago
  In the article the term "organic" isn't used at all: > The dating seems about right, said Abigail Allwood , a NASA > astrobiologist who found the previous oldest fossil, from > 3.48 billion years ago, in Australia. But Allwood said she is > not completely convinced that what VanKranendonk's team found > once was alive. She said the evidence wasn't conclusive enough > that it was life and not a geologic quirk. > > "It would be nice to have more evidence, but in these rocks > that's a lot to ask," Allwood said in an email.
- yesbabyyes 10y ago
  While it has already been cleared out, I would just like to point to this, from wiktionary: organic ‎(comparative more organic, superlative most organic) 1. (biology) Pertaining to or derived from living organisms.
  - scoot 10y ago
    "cleared up", but yes, this is exactly what I took from OP's use of the term 'organic'.
    - Practicality 10y ago
      I suppose I was hopeful that it was silicon based life :)
mturmon 10y ago
That previous fossil-finder (Abigail Allwood) wrote the overview article (http://www.nature.com/nature/journal/vaop/ncurrent/full/nature19429.html http://www.nature.com/nature/journal/vaop/ncurrent/full/natu...) introducing the Nature paper that is the subject of the OP. Her overview emphasizes the significance of this finding for exo-life, linking the finding to recent discoveries of ancient water, lakes, and streamflows on Mars, rather than the caveats. The more general news-based article in Nature (http://www.nature.com/news/claims-of-earth-s-oldest-fossils-tantalize-researchers-1.20506 http://www.nature.com/news/claims-of-earth-s-oldest-fossils-...) has several experts checking in with caveats.
- tempestn 10y ago
  Perfect, thanks.
zipwitch 10y ago
Or perhaps made from some strange matter, alien to understanding? (What does a fossilized Great Old One look like, anyway? Would it still be alive?)
deleted 10y ago
[deleted]

deleted 10y ago

[deleted]

mpnagle 10y ago

hail helix

swayvil 10y ago

3.5 billion years ago the skies were orange, the oceans were green and the land was black.

mwpmaybe 10y ago
And men were men, and women liked it!
- mwpmaybe 10y ago
  OK, maybe I should have gone with, "And men were real men, women were real women, and small, furry creatures from Alpha Centauri were real small, furry creatures from Alpha Centauri."
dredmorbius 10y ago
It was a true iron age. Do you have any refs on the Earth's appearance at the time?
- andrewflnr 10y ago
  It's at the bottom of TFA. First I've seen it, too.
  - dredmorbius 10y ago
    Ah, missed that, thanks.
peter303 10y ago
Robert Hazen recent book on Earth assigns a distinctive color to each major geologic era- red, black, blue, green, white ...

usaphp 10y ago

Can someone explain me how do they determine the age?

CodeSheikh 10y ago
Carbon dating https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Radiocarbon_dating https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Radiocarbon_dating https://www.boundless.com/biology/textbooks/boundless-biology-textbook/evolution-and-the-origin-of-species-18/evidence-of-evolution-129/carbon-dating-and-estimating-fossil-age-520-13098/ https://www.boundless.com/biology/textbooks/boundless-biolog...
- cjslep 10y ago
  No, carbon-14 dating doesn't even reliably hit 1 million years ago, let alone 3 billion. Edit: Even your Wiki link cites 500,000 years.
- dkurth 10y ago
  According to that boundless.com link, "The half-life of carbon-14 is 5,730 years, so carbon dating is only relevant for dating fossils less than 60,000 years old."
- usaphp 10y ago
  But from the Wikipedia about radiocarbon method: "Radiocarbon dating is a radiometric dating method that uses (14C) to determine the age of carbonaceous materials up to about 60,000 years old."
slezakattack 10y ago
The most well-known way of determining fossil age is carbon dating[0]. [0] http://science.howstuffworks.com/environmental/earth/geology/carbon-14.htm http://science.howstuffworks.com/environmental/earth/geology...
acidburnNSA 10y ago
Using radiogenic isotope geology. Carbon dating only works on very recent things (up to a few tens of thousands of years). For older things like the earth and these fossils, slower-ticking radiometric clocks (like Uranium-Lead clocks) must be used. There was a great COSMOS episode discussing the history of it [1] but the fascinating math and science behind it is better explained for the layperson in [2]. [1] http://channel.nationalgeographic.com/cosmos-a-spacetime-odyssey/episodes/the-clean-room/ http://channel.nationalgeographic.com/cosmos-a-spacetime-ody... [2] https://whatisnuclear.com/physics/age_of_earth.html https://whatisnuclear.com/physics/age_of_earth.html

nxzero 10y ago

As a little context, the oldest known minerals on Earth are a 4.4 billion-year-old and Earth itself is 4.543 billion years-old.

deleted 10y ago

[deleted]

dredmorbius 10y ago

In a related bit of paleogeology, a large share of iron ore, particularly banded iron formations (BIF) date from about this time -- they're typically about 1.2 - 3.7 billion years old, and date to the periods of early life, a large amount of free molecular (unoxidised) iron, a methane atmosphere, and early cyanobacteria whose metabolic waste product was oxygen. This combined with free dissolved iron in early oceans, precipitated out as iron oxides, and left the deposits now mined for ores. Exhaustion of the dissolved iron resource lead to a rise in atmospheric oxygen (poisonous to the cyanobacteria), a depletion of the methane which served to warm the Earth under the light of a much cooler sun, and resulted in a half-billion year "Snowball Earth" period -- an earlier form of overzealous biological organisms triggering catastrophic environmental pollution and climate change. I find it fascinating to think about how and where minerals came from (iron originates in stellar fusion, it's the low point of the atomic potential curve, and hence you cannot fuse nor fission iron nuclei to release energy), and how they came to be organised in deposits. Many minerals are concentrated through prior biological activity -- iron, limestone, and of course, coal and petroleum. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Banded_iron_formation https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Banded_iron_formation (Edit: Corrected erronious initial explanation of iron deposition -- precipitation, not biological binding.)

sattoshi 10y ago

They measured a foot and the head of a mammoth to magnitudes of difference already. You can't measure stuff that old. They almost decide how old they want it to be.

okket 10y ago

FWIW, Ed Yong: The newly discovered rocks suggest that life arose very quickly after the Earth was formed. http://www.theatlantic.com/science/archive/2016/08/the-worlds-oldest-fossils-are-37-billion-years-old/498056/ http://www.theatlantic.com/science/archive/2016/08/the-world...

hownottowrite 10y ago

Side note: Interesting paper on mathematical model often used in analyzing the patterns in stromatolites and other growing interfaces: the Kardar–Parisi–Zhang equation. "Pattern formation in stromatolites: insights from mathematical modeling" http://rsif.royalsocietypublishing.org/content/9/70/1051 http://rsif.royalsocietypublishing.org/content/9/70/1051