TINY tubes in lava 3.5 billion years old may be the world’s oldest trace fossils, pushing back hard evidence for life by around 800 million years. Hints of life from even further back have been seen in isotope traces, but till now the oldest undisputed fossil evidence has dated from only 2.7 billion years ago.
Harald Furnes of the University of Bergen in Norway is basing his claim on the similarity between tubes in ancient rock and holes drilled by microbes in modern seafloor lavas. But the evidence does not convince Martin Brasier, the University of Oxford palaeobiologist who two…
