

Newly discovered Lokiarchaeota shows how multicellular life could evolve - tokenadult
http://www.washingtonpost.com/news/speaking-of-science/wp/2015/05/06/newly-discovered-missing-link-called-loki-ties-us-to-our-single-celled-ancestors/

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gpvos
_> Because of this, the researchers who discovered it believe it may share a
common ancestor with us_

Sloppy sentence. As far as we know, _all_ life shares a common ancestor with
us, even bacteria, fungi, and plants.

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gus_massa
I agree. The scientific article is interesting, but the press report has a lot
of misleading parts. Another:

> _Since the 1970s, life has traditionally been divided into three domains:
> multicelled organisms, such as plants and animals, and the two domains of
> single-celled life, bacteria and archaea._

There are a lot of unicellular Eukaryotes. For example in this graphic,
[http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Filogenia_Cavalier-
Sm...](http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Filogenia_Cavalier-
Smith_2013_-_5_reinos.svg) the big orange blob is made of unicellular and
almost unicellular Eukaryotes. Plants, Animals and Fungus are the small blobs
in the corners.

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bjackman
I've found this stuff fascinating ever since I saw the stromatolites [1] at
Shark Bay in Australia. They evolved 3.5 thousand million years ago. That's
closer to the formation of the earth (4.5Gya) than now. It was thousands of
millions more years before even _cellular_ life, let alone multicellular life
formed, and we know so little about it.

There's so much to read about this root end of the taxonomic tree, but
unfortunately scientists seem to be pretty unsure about everything.

[1]
[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stromatolite](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stromatolite)

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danieltillett
While the stromatolites at Shark Bay are amazing they are only a few thousand
years old and are biologically nothing like the ancient stromatolites.

Scientists are pretty sure about the root of the taxonomic tree - it is how
the root came about that is the big mystery.

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pmontra
Or, in the 2 billion years since the common ancestor, it had plenty of time to
evolve those genes like we did. There was an article in SciAm about living
fossils recently and how inappropriate that term really is.

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vanderZwan
> Ettema and his team don't know what Loki uses these familiar genes for.

Maybe they should try this experiment with the Lokiarchaeota?

[http://www.nature.com/news/yeast-suggests-speedy-start-
for-m...](http://www.nature.com/news/yeast-suggests-speedy-start-for-
multicellular-life-1.9810)

