Darwin was right about ‘pond life’

LIFE began when meteorites bombarded ‘warm little ponds’ on the Earth’s surface, scientists said yesterday.

Experts have usually favoured the idea that the first creatures originated from bubbling volcanic vents deep in the oceans around four billion years ago.

But the latest study lends support to the ideas of Charles Darwin. In 1871 he suggested life began in ‘some warm little pond with all sorts of ammonia and phosphoric salts, light, heat, electricity et cetera present’. The calculations of scientists at McMaster University in Canada and the Max Planck Institute in Germany show that meteorites could have delivered the ammonia as well as hydrogen cyanide.

The chemicals are necessary to make RNA, a building block of life.

Dr Thomas Henning, who co-authored the study, said: ‘To understand the origin of life, we need to understand Earth as it was billions of years ago. Our study shows astronomy provides a vital part of the answer.’

The authors of the paper say volcanic vents were unlikely to have generated the first life because RNA needed both wet and dry cycles to bond properly. They plan to test their theory that they can create artificial life in the laboratory next year. They stressed the results would not be ‘life as we know it’ – but a forerunner to even the simplest of the one-cell creatures living today.