What if life started using oxygen long before there was any in the atmosphere? In this episode of The Deep Dive, we journey back over 4 billion years to explore the mysterious world of Earth’s first bacteria. With the help of AI, scientists have unearthed groundbreaking clues about how these tiny organisms survived, evolved, and even used oxygen nearly a billion years earlier than we thought possible.
You’ll discover:
- How scientists reconstruct ancient bacterial genomes
- The role of the Great Oxidation Event in shaping life
- Surprising evidence that some microbes used oxygen long before it was abundant
- Why cyanobacteria may have been pre-adapted for an oxygen-rich world
- How AI is revolutionizing our understanding of evolution
- The massive data challenges behind this research—and how StoneFly helps scientists manage them
🔍 Dive into the fusion of evolutionary biology, geology, and machine learning to uncover a story billions of years in the making.
