Man’s ancestor ‘ate sulphur’

Press, 28 January 1988, Page 40

Man’s ancestor ‘ate sulphur’

NZPA-PA London Theories about the origins of life on Earth looked like being shattered, with a report that the common ancestor of all living things ate sulphur and basked in boiling hot springs. For half a century the fashionable view has been that the first organisms lived in a warm "biochemical soup,” such as a pond. But Professor James Lake, of the University of California in Los Angeles, challenges the accepted wisdom in the British science journal, “Nature.” He said the most recent common ancestor of all

living things was probably a sulphur-eating organism which thrived in boiling sulphur springs. His new finding about the evolutionary tree is based on a computer analysiss of genetic material in the “factories” used by cells to make proteins. Professor Lake said that determining the evolutionary tree that relates all organisms had previously been hindered by a lack of analytical techniques. “This is now possible, and this knowledge should bring a new and deeper comprehension of the origins of life,” he said.