US EditionAI Detects Life Signs in 3.3 Billion-Year-Old Rocks
Researchers used AI with 98% accuracy to identify biosignatures in 3.3-billion-year-old rocks, revealing oxygen-producing photosynthesis nearly 1 billion years earlier than known.
- On November 17, 2025, a Carnegie-led team reported chemical evidence for life preserved in multiple 3.3-billion-year-old formations in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.
- Because most ancient biomolecules were degraded by burial and heating, the team used high-resolution chemical analysis and supervised machine learning to recover faint biosignatures from fragile remnants.
- The AI model performed strongly, examining more than 400 samples from modern plants and animals, fossils, and meteorites, reporting probability scores and achieving over 90% accuracy in distinguishing biological from non-biological materials.
- The study roughly doubles the chemical biosignature time window and shows oxygen-producing photosynthesis operated at least 2.5 billion years ago, shifting the record by about 800 million years.
- Although promising, the method faces key limitations due to scarcity of ancient animal fossils in training data and geological transformations that obliterate biosignatures, requiring targets for future improvement and validation.
18 Articles
18 Articles
Living things lived on Earth long before us, but there is little, if any, information about the very first of them.
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Scientists have discovered a simple and reliable test for signs of past or present life on other planets – “the holy grail of astrobiology.” In the journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, a seven-member team, funded by the John Templeton Foundation and led by Jim Cleaves and Robert Hazen of the Carnegie Institution for Science, reports that, with 90% accuracy, their artificial intelligence-based method distinguished modern and a…
Earth's earliest life 3.3 billion years ago revealed by faint biosignatures
A new study uncovered fresh chemical evidence of life in rocks more than 3.3 billion years old, along with molecular traces showing that oxygen-producing photosynthesis emerged nearly a billion years earlier than previously thought.
American scientists proved by artificial intelligence that there is life 3.3 billion years ago.With the technology used to date, only reliable evidence could be found until 1.7 billion years ago.
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