Clickbait summary?
Sure:
Scientists FINALLY figured it out! The numbers of ancestors that all life came from is the SMALLEST number! LESS than 4. And the AGE of this ancestor is so old that the only human that can comprehend it is ISAAC EINSTEIN!!
But anyway, reading the article…looks like this is the meat of it:
For years, scientists have estimated that LUCA [last universal common ancestor] likely arrived on the scene some 4 billion years, which is only 600 million years after the planet’s formation.
But a study from an international team of scientists pushes that timeline back even further to some 4.2 billion years ago.
The scientists estimate that while LUCA was a simple prokaryote, it likely had an immune system, meaning it was already fighting off primordial viruses.
The study: The nature of the last universal common ancestor and its impact on the early Earth system, published 2024.



