Just as linguists have been able to establish that all human languages have a common origin, so it turns out that all cellular life has a common origin. The ancestor of all life on Earth today has been dubbed LUCA, short for Last Universal Common Ancestor. The fact that there must have been a LUCA was first made clear in the 1960s when the genetic code was deciphered and found to be universal. In the forty years since the code was cracked, the emphasis is now on trying to reconstruct LUCA, but the emerging picture is substantially blurred by new insights into the evolutionary history of life.
Interesting bit about the search for the beginnings of life.
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