A recent New Scientist article, “The most ancient piece of you” (4 November 2017), discussed the common ancestors of living beings today. But are plants included in this universal common ancestor? If so, are we linked to plants in very early stages of evolution?
• The short answer is yes, very much so. Leaving aside what may have happened in the primordial ooze, early life consisted of simple prokaryotic cells. These used DNA as their genetic mechanism, but it was not segregated from the rest of the cell as it is in the more advanced eukaryotic cells that make up…
