Reconstructing/Deconstructing the Earliest Eukaryotes

Reconstructing/Deconstructing the Earliest Eukaryotes How Comparative Genomics Can Help

We could reconstruct the evolution of eukaryote-specific molecular and cellular machinery if some living eukaryotes retained primitive cellular structures and we knew which eukaryotes these were. It's not clear that either is the case, but the expanding protist genomic database could help us in several ways.

A Laurentian record of the earliest fossil eukaryotes

The oldest evidence of eukaryotes in the fossil record comes from a recurrent assemblage of morphologically differentiated late Paleoproterozoic to early Mesoproterozoic microfossils. Although widely distributed, the principal constituents of this Tappania-DictyosphaeraValeria assemblage have not hitherto been recognized on Laurentia. We have recovered all three taxa from a shallow-water shale ...

The earliest knockouts.

The Earliest Matches

Cylindrical objects made usually of fired clay but sometimes of stone were found at the Yarmukian Pottery Neolithic sites of Sha'ar HaGolan and Munhata (first half of the 8(th) millennium BP) in the Jordan Valley. Similar objects have been reported from other Near Eastern Pottery Neolithic sites. Most scholars have interpreted them as cultic objects in the shape of phalli, while others have ref...

The Earliest Report