Ancient microbes tied to our earliest ancestors could use oxygen, reshaping ideas about how complex life began on Earth.

A team led by Brett Baker at the University of Texas at Austin has found that some Asgard archaea, the ancient microbial group most closely related to all complex life on Earth, carried the molecular ...

Learn how oxygen’s early rise could have given complex life the energy boost it needed to evolve.

Add Yahoo as a preferred source to see more of our stories on Google. MIT-led research suggests microbes used oxygen hundreds of millions of years before Earth’s Great Oxidation Event. (CREDIT: ...

Some of Earth’s earliest microbes evolved the ability to use oxygen hundreds of millions of years before it accumulated in the atmosphere.

Aerobic respiration began hundreds of millions of years earlier than previously thought, a new study suggests.