Oldest Life

The earth is continually growing older in the eyes of geologists; they now think that it is something like 4.5 billion years old. The paleontologists who study ancient life are also finding proof that living organisms are respectably elderly.

Professors Elso S. Barghoorn of Harvard and Stanley A. Tyler of the University of Wisconsin announced last week that they had found the oldest fossils so far. In a layer of flint beneath an iron ore deposit in Ontario, they identified two kinds of algae, two of fungi and an organism that they believe may be a calcareous (containing calcium) flagellate. None of them are striking in appearance; they are much like primitive organisms that are still living.

The remarkable thing about them is their enormous age. The iron ore above the flint bed has been dated by Professor Patrick Hurley of M.I.T., who estimates that it is 1.3 billion years old. Since the fossil algae and fungi lie far below it, they are probably something like 2 billion years old.

They were not the oldest life of all. Though simple in structure, they are complicated chemically, and so must be the products of slow evolution. Their simplest forebears may reach back into time another billion years.

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