With all the excitement surrounding the giants of the past, we rarely consider the much smaller, even microscopic creatures that started it all. Bacteria and plants existed long before any other life and set the stage for more complex and larger life forms like us, particularly via the establishment of an oxygen-rich atmosphere. By looking at these ancient microbes and plant colonies, we can inquire further into our own beginnings and the chemical origin of life itself.

Fossil stromatolites offer us insight into the earliest life on Earth, 3.5 billion years ago. They don't look like much - simple globules of colonized bacteria - but stromatolites reveal the basic constituents of early evolution and potentially the development of photosynthesis, which provides nearly all the energy for life on Earth.

     Most grade school biology students are familiar with the experiments of Stanley Miller and Harold Urey, mimicking in the lab the atmospheric conditions of a young Earth and looking for early chemical indicators of life. Richard Lenski's ongoing (since 1988) E. coli experiment has offered evidence for evolution and impressive specialization among identical starting cultures after a relatively short period of time; evolution in action! Some biologists are even beginning to look at synthetic life and replicate the origin of life in the lab, using the original building blocks of RNA.

Perhaps most exciting are the recent successes in reviving ancient bacterial species, some over 100,000 years old. These discoveries show us that fossil rock and amber aren't the only places to find DNA - ice is also a means of preserving centuries of tissue, even whole organisms in this case. A recent study even suggested that a modern avian virus may have been around for over 19 million years.