Integrated genomic and fossil evidence illuminates life’s early evolution and eukaryote origins

Abstract

Establishing a unified timescale for the early evolution of Earth and Life is challenging and mired in controversy because of the paucity of fossil evidence, the difficulty of interpreting it, and dispute over the deepest branching relationships in the tree of life. Surprisingly, it remains perhaps the only episode in the history of Life where literal interpretations of the fossil record hold sway, revised with every new discovery and reinterpretation. We derive a timescale of life, combining a reappraisal of the fossil material with new molecular clock analyses. We find that the last universal common ancestor of cellular life (LUCA) predated the end of late heavy bombardment (>3.9 Ga). The crown clades of the two primary divisions of life, Eubacteria and Archaebacteria, emerged much later (<3.4 Ga), relegating the oldest fossil evidence for life to their stem lineages. The Great Oxidation Event significantly predates the origin of modern Cyanobacteria, indicating that photosynthesis evolved within the cyanobacterial stem-lineage. Modern eukaryotes emerged late in Earth history (<1.84 Ga), falsifying the hypothesis that the GOE facilitated their radiation. The symbiotic origin of mitochondria, at 2.053 – 1.21 Ga reflects a late origin of the eukaryotes, that do not constitute a primary linage of life.