While there is fossil evidence of life older than 3.3bn years, this is the first time that its molecular chemical fingerprints have been detected through high-tech sleuthing.

Chemical evidence of life has been uncovered in South African rocks 3.3 billion years old, doubling the timelines for this window into our deep past and charting a new scientific trail that could help detect the spoor of life on other planets.

The findings, presented by scientists on Monday, 17 November in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, push back the dating on this front by an astonishing 1.6 billion years. The earliest such traces had previously been detected in rocks 1.7 billion years old.

Spearheaded by scientists from the Carnegie Institution for Science in collaboration with several other institutions, the study, which combined state-of-the-art chemistry with artificial intelligence (AI), also found evidence of oxygen-producing photosynthesis 2.5 billion years ago, extending this timeline back by 800 million years.

This finding was also yielded from South African geology - the 3.3-billion-year-old evidence of life from the Josefsdal Chert near Barberton in Mpumalanga, while the earliest known evidence of photosynthesis was found in the Gamohaan Formation near Kuruman in the Northern Cape.

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