The search for our ultimate ancestor has been ongoing for centuries. New fossil research now suggests the earliest human ancestor has been found. It is not perhaps the most glamourous creature. After all it had no anus so it seems to have eaten and defecated out of the same orifice. It lived about 540 million years ago.
It was tiny, living between grains of sand in the seabed, but it evolved into fish and then into mammals and then humans, scientists now believe.
According to GistFest Professor Simon Conway Morris of Cambridge University said
Its identification followed the discovery of its microfossils in the Shaanxi province of Central China. The saccorhytus still remains arguably the most monumental finding in the quest for human origin, according to the professor.
“To the naked eye, the fossils we studied look like tiny black grains, but under the microscope the level of detail was jaw-dropping.”
Scientists believe that the saccorhytus is the most elementary example of a category of animals called “Deuterostomes.” Deuterostomes are the common ancestors of a wide range of animals, including the group of animals with backbones.
“We think that as an early deuterostome this may represent the primitive beginnings of a very diverse range of species, including ourselves,” said Professor Morris. “All deuterostomes had a common ancestor, and we think that is what we are looking at here,” the Professor said.
According to Britannica:
Deuterostomia, (Greek: “second mouth”), group of animals—including those of the phyla Echinodermata (e.g., starfish, sea urchins), Chordata (e.g., sea squirts, lancelets, and vertebrates), Chaetognatha (e.g., arrowworms), and Brachiopoda (e.g., lamp shells)—classified together on the basis of embryological development and by molecular criteria. During development the mouth of deuterostomes develops from an opening into the embryonic gut other than the blastopore, which develops into the anus. The coelom (a fluid-filled body cavity lined with mesoderm) develops from buds off the embryonic gut. A number of deuterostomes have distinctive larval forms. The Deuterostomia constitute one of two divisions of the coelomates (animals having a coelom). Compare Protostomia..” Links in original.
The discovery of possibly the earliest human ancestor does not settle the question of the origins of life. Some believe that life originated beyond Earth and arrived with an asteroid. Believers in Panspermia think the octopus is a space alien.
