Every human, animal, plant, fungus and bacterium alive today shares an astonishing connection deep in Earth’s past.
Scientists call it LUCA, the Last Universal Common Ancestor. LUCA was not the first living thing, but an ancient population from which all cellular life surviving today ultimately descends.
Recent research places it around 4.2 billion years ago, when Earth was still incredibly young. Even more remarkable, LUCA may already have possessed a complex metabolism, thousands of protein coding genes and primitive defenses against genetic parasites.
The tree of life has billions of branches, but trace them far enough back and they eventually converge on the same ancient beginning.
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