Ancient evidence suggests a new twist in how we all got here.

Every organism alive on Earth, from oak trees to octopuses to the bacteria in our gut, belongs to a single extended family. Genetic evidence points back to one ancestral cell, a last common forebear ...

Few questions have captivated humankind more than the origin of life on Earth. How did the first living cells come to exist? How did these early protocells develop the structural membranes necessary ...

In a new book, astrophysicist Mario Livio describes how the existence of life on Earth can be traced back to an RNA-based “protocell.” The following is an excerpt from Is Earth Exceptional?: The Quest ...

The origin of life could therefore be closely linked to the special environment of large soda lakes, which, due to their geological setting and phosphorus balance, provided ideal conditions for ...

The questions of how humankind came to be, and whether we are alone in the universe, have captured imaginations for millennia. But to answer these questions, scientists must first understand life ...

In many submerged regions, murky mud shelters strange life-forms that seem to be the key to one of the biggest mysteries of life on Earth. These creatures belong to a domain of life called the archaea ...

Caroline Lynn Kamerlin receives funding from the NASA Exobiology program. Liam Longo receives funding from the NASA Exobiology program. The questions of how humankind came to be, and whether we are ...