ScienceDaily: Fossils & Ruins News

Researchers create compelling scenario for the evolution of membraneless microdroplets as the origin of life.

A new paper by archaeologists at the University of California, Davis, highlights that our extinct cousins, the Denisovans, reached the "roof of the world" about 160,000 years ago -- 120,000 years earlier than previous estimates for our species -- and even contributed to our adaptation to high altitude.

Iron is an essential nutrient that almost all life requires to grow and thrive. Iron's importance goes all the way back to the formation of the planet Earth, where the amount of iron in the Earth's rocky mantle was 'set' by the conditions under which the planet formed and went on to have major ramifications for how life developed. Now, scientists have uncovered the likely mechanisms by which iron influenced the development of complex life forms, which can also be used to understand how likely (or unlikely) advanced life forms might be on other planets.