"Hearst Magazines and Yahoo may earn commission or revenue on some items through these links." Life on Earth had to begin somewhere, and scientists think that “somewhere” is LUCA—or the Last Universal ...

Four billion years ago, Earth was violent, hot, and unstable. Yet new research suggests that by then, life had already reached a surprising level of complexity. At that time lived the last universal ...

Every organism alive on Earth, from oak trees to octopuses to the bacteria in our gut, belongs to a single extended family. Genetic evidence points back to one ancestral cell, a last common forebear ...

The mystery of life’s beginnings has long captivated scientists. Central to that search is LUCA—the last universal common ancestor. LUCA sits at the root of the evolutionary tree, where two great ...

Here’s what you’ll learn when you read this story: Primitive single-celled organisms known as archaea have a survival mechanism that may be a legacy of the world’s earliest life-form. The last ...