• Question: Are we all related since we all come from the same organism?

    Asked by to Paul, James, Ed, Anthony on 7 Jan 2019. This question was also asked by .
    • Photo: Anthony Redmond

      Anthony Redmond answered on 7 Jan 2019:

      All life as we know it comes from a single origin, meaning we are all related. Even bacteria are our very distant cousins! However, earth is around 4.5 billion years old, and current research suggests we began forming a separate branch from bacteria on the tree of life around 4 billion years ago. Simpler early life may have existed for quite a while before this. That same organism that we all come from lived a very long time ago!

    • Photo: Ed Morrison

      Ed Morrison answered on 7 Jan 2019:

      Yes. That’s the ultimate implication of evolutionary theory. Darwin himself proposed this and we know pretty much know it’s true. The so-called “last universal common ancestor”, probably a bacteria, existed about 3.8 billion years ago.

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