Oops, the Oldest Fossils Ever Found Might Be Just Rocks
At first, Abigail Allwood saw nothing wrong with Allen Nutman’s claims.
In August 2016, Nutman, a geologist from the University of Wollongong, announced that he and his colleagues had found the world’s oldest fossils in an outcrop in Greenland. The team discovered rows of inch-high conical humps embedded in 3.7-billion-year-old rocks, and interpreted them as stromatolites—layered mounds created by colonies of ancient marine bacteria. The oldest accepted stromatolites, from the Pilbara region of Australia, are 3.5 billion years old. Nutman’s finds were 200 million years older.
His team published the results in the journal , and , a geologist, wrote a commentary to accompany them. She was largely positive and explained that the finds pushed the origin of life on Earth nearer to the very origin of the planet itself. If the interpretation was accurate, it suggested that life is likely not a fussy phenomenon but one that will take
