by Richard Peachey

Perhaps you noticed this recent news item:

“What were billed as the oldest fossils on Earth may just be some rocks, according to a new study. Two years ago, a team of Australian scientists found odd structures in Greenland that they said were partly leftovers from microbes that lived on an ancient sea floor. They were said to be 3.7 billion years old, which suggests life formed quicker and easier than thought after Earth formed. But on Wednesday, the journal Nature, which published the 2016 study, released new research using NASA technology that concludes the structures found on rocks were not likely not fossils but more rock.“

(That’s the version of the news item that appeared in the National Post, Oct. 18, 2018, in a large font, at the bottom of page A2. The abstract of the new Nature research article can be read here.)

In one sense, though, that item isn’t actually “news.” This cycle of claim of ancient life followed by debunking of claim has been a regular feature of the geological literature since 2002.

Between 2002 and 2005, all the previous major claims of three-billion-year-old-plus life — in Greenland, Australia, and South Africa — were debunked, leaving the field of ancient life in tatters. And there has been no real improvement in the situation since 2005: every new claim of that sort has been subjected to well-deserved scrutiny.

For more about such claims of ancient life, and the repeated debunking thereof, see my detailed article “Mistaken Microfossils! (And Other Erroneous Evidence of Early Earthlife).”