If this happened a lot in human history schools would just have to give up teaching history. Good story anyway:
Scientists believe they have identified the oldest fossils on Earth, dating back at least 3.75 billion years and possibly even 4.2 billion years, in rocks found at a remote location in northern Québec, Canada, according to a new study.
If the structures in these rocks are biological in origin, it would push the timeline of life on our planet back by 300 million years at a minimum, and could potentially show that the earliest known organisms are barely younger than Earth itself. Such a finding would have major implications for understanding the emergence of life on Earth, and could also inform the search for aliens on other worlds.
Becky Ferreira, “Discovery Dramatically Rewrites History of Life on Earth, Scientists Say” at Vice (April 13, 2022)
It’s a great find. But the ease with which a history can be rewritten tells us something about its reliability.
The paper is open access.
You may also wish to read: Neil Thomas comments on the difficulty of accommodating Darwinism to sudden origin of life. Here’s a thought: If your origin of life theory works, can we reverse engineer the conditions to produce life from non-life today? If we can’t, that doesn’t prove your theory false. After all, it is very difficult to demonstrate that something “couldn’t have” happened under any circumstances whatever. But you must now rejoin the queue in your previous place…