Learn more about the top theories about how life began on Earth, and how it may not have started from scratch.

How did life begin on Earth? While scientists have theories, they don't yet fully understand the precise chemical steps that led to biology, or when the first primitive life forms appeared. Subscribe ...

Life on Earth may have learned to breathe oxygen long before oxygen filled the skies. MIT researchers traced a key ...

Ancient enzymes show life’s nitrogen signal stayed unchanged for billions of years, helping scientists read early Earth.

Forbes contributors publish independent expert analyses and insights. I write about biodiversity and the hidden quirks of the natural world. We’ve pieced together a remarkably detailed timeline of ...

Nitrogen, upon which all life on Earth depends, may hold the key for explaining how early life on the planet evolved and how it could evolve on other planets. "All living organisms need nitrogen to ...

The volume of the ocean, its average purity, and the chemical makeup of H₂O allow a simple estimate of the amount of hydrogen ...

Life’s story may stretch further back than scientists once thought. Some genes found in nearly every organism today were already duplicated before all life shared a common ancestor. By tracking these ...

Scientists have confirmed that a tiny zircon crystal is the oldest piece of the Earth's crust, at 4.4 billion years old. The crystal was discovered on a sheep ranch in Perth, Australia in 2001, but ...