Life may have had a false start on earth over 2 billion years ago

[Brian G Turner]

Fascinating - a suggestion that complex life might have begun to develop just over 2 billion years ago - only to disappear again:

Complex life may have had a false start 2.3 billion years ago

 

[Venusian Broon]

Possibly not complex life - I think the most pertinent comment is at the end:

Life’s apparent failure to become complex during the Lomagundi Event despite having the oxygen to do so is unsurprising, says Nicholas Butterfield at the University of Cambridge. Rather than a lack of oxygen delaying the appearance of animals until the past 800 million years, he thinks the reason was that it took evolution aeons to "work out" how to develop such biologically complex organisms

In other words, life simply wasn’t ready to become complex at this time. “I think it does support the view that there is far more to the story than oxygen,” Butterfield says.

I also wonder (but likely we'll never really find out ) how important the impact of 'Snowball Earth' was on evolution of complex forms as from memory I believe complex life really started to explode after that event. It might be (scarily) a very peculiar, perhaps extremely rare, set of events that gives rise to multi-cellular critters and plants.

 

[Stephen Palmer]

A very interesting article, this.
We're still somewhat limited by our knowledge of Snowball Earth events, which are very difficult to judge from the limited evidence.