The question of how life first formed on earth has baffled humans for ages. Now, Indian American scientist, Sankar Chatterjee, has claimed that he knows the answer to how life formed 3.8 billion years ago.
Chatterjee is a Professor of geo-sciences and curator of Paleontology at the museum of Texas Tech University. NDTV reported on his findings presented at the Annual Meeting of the Geological Society of America in Denver last week.
According to Chatterjee, it was all thanks to a regular meteorite bombardment to the earth’s surface nearly 4 billion years ago. These strikes created large craters containing water, the basic chemical building blocks for life and the perfect set of conditions to form the first simple-cell organisms.
Chatterjee came to these findings by studying three sites in Australia, South Africa and Greenland containing the world’s oldest fossils.
“[Earth] was a seething cauldron of erupting volcanoes, raining meteors and hot, noxious gasses. One billion years later, it was a placid, watery planet teeming with microbial life,” said Chatterjee in a press statement.
According to Chatterjee, life on earth began in four increasingly complex stages: cosmic, geological, chemical and biological.