Wherever and whenever life is found, it is incredibly complex. This certainly applies to cyanobacterial photosynthetic life that supposedly were some of the simplest and very first organic life forms to evolve from inorganic nonlife.¹

Cardiff University recently reported, “Until now, scientists broadly accepted animals first emerged on Earth 635 million years ago.”² However, evolutionists have unearthed evidence, they maintain, of a much earlier ecosystem.

A decade ago, fossils were uncovered in the Franceville Basin, Central Africa, suggesting creatures similar to sea anemones had evolved at a time evolutionists thought was impossible: 2.1 billion years ago.³ That is 1.5 billion years older than was assumed. Science writer Sarah Knapton stated, “Flying saucer-like creatures nearly seven inches in length, resembling jellyfish, appeared to be living in the region 1.5 billion years earlier than they were thought to exist.”⁴

These enigmatic creatures supposedly appeared because “there was a period of violent underwater volcanic activity in the region as parts of ancient Africa and South America – known as the Congo and São Francisco cratons [stable sections of Earth’s continental crust].”⁴ Evolutionist Dr. Ernest Chi Fru thinks this undersea volcanic activity may have resulted in the creation of “a nutrient-rich shallow marine inland sea”⁵ that was cut off from the ancient global ocean.

“This created a localised environment where cyanobacterial photosynthesis was abundant for an extended period of time, leading to the oxygenation of local seawater and the generation of a large food resource.”

“This would have provided sufficient energy to promote increase in body size and greater complex behaviour observed in primitive simple animal-like life forms such as those found in the fossils from this period.”⁵

These are suppositions stacked on suppositions, a hallmark of evolutionism. For example, it’s highly unlikely that a shallow marine inland sea could be isolated from the global ocean. But they need to make these types of claims to fit their evolutionary story.

Furthermore, they claim these series of purely hypothetical events set the stage “for Earth’s earliest biospheric experimentation towards microbiological complexity about 2100 million years ago.”⁶

In their Precambrian Research paper, Fru et al. stated,

Although the link between environmental oxygen threshold levels and the role of genetic innovation in the transition to complex multicellular life is debated, oxygen availability and genetic innovation, in tandem with nutrient levels, likely worked in synergy to drive biological diversification towards greater complexity, given that low environmental oxygen levels also select for small size individuals and higher levels large size organisms.⁶ (emphasis added)

The evolution of complex life forms is both vague and subjective. As this discovery demonstrates, evolutionists don’t know which kinds of life evolved or when: “Scientists are still working to pin down which types of life evolved when, and there’s no guarantee that all evolutionary jumps would’ve stuck.”¹

Genesis 1 is clear. God created life on this planet in all its varieties thousands of years ago.

References

1. Nield, D. Complex Life on Earth May be 1.5bn Years Older Than We Thought. ScienceAlert. Posted on sciencealert.com July 31, 2024.
2. Complex Life on Earth Began around 1.5 Billion Years Earlier Than Previously Thought, New Study Claims. Cardiff University News. Posted on cardiff.ac.uk July 31, 2024.
3. Sherwin, F. Sea Anemone Fossils. Creation Science Update. Posted on ICR.org April 17, 2023.
4. Knapton, S. Fossils Suggest Complex Life on Earth 1.5bn Years Older Than Thought. MSN. Posted on msn.com July 29, 2024.
5. News Staff. Complex Organisms First Appeared 2.1 Billion Years Ago, Paleontologists Say. Sci.News. Posted on sci.news July 31, 2024.
6. Fru, E. et al. Hydrothermal Seawater Eutrophication Triggered Local Macrobiological Experimentation in the 2100 Ma Paleoproterozoic Francevillian Sub-basin. Precambrian Research. 409 (107453).

Stage image: Petrified fossil stromatolite (blue-green algae)

* Dr. Sherwin is a science news writer at the Institute for Creation Research. He earned an M.A. in invertebrate zoology from the University of Northern Colorado and received an honorary doctorate of science from Pensacola Christian College.