life to begin, it  once. t is t extraordinary factin biology, per extraordinary fact  or animal, dates its beginnings from tc some point in anunimaginably distant past some little bag of ced to life. It absorbed somenutrients, gently pulsed, ence. times. But tral packet did sometional and extraordinary: it cleaveditself and produced an iny bundle of genetic material passed from one living entity toanotopped moving since. It  of creation for us all.

    Biologists sometimes call it th.

    “ever animal, plant, bug, or blob you look at, if it isalive, it ionary and knotRidley. e are all t of a single genetic trick ion togeneration nearly four billion years, to sucent t you can take a fragment of ic instruction, patc into a faulty yeast cell, and t cell  it to s o is its own.

    t—sits on a sope geoc named Victoria Bennett in tralianNational University in Canberra. An American, Ms. Bennett came to tract in 1989 and ed e 2001, sly y ernating stripesof z and a gray-green material called clinopyroxene. t rocks  t marine sediments ever found.

    “e can’t be certain t  to find out,” Bennett told me. “But it comes from ted, so it probably .” Nor ualfossilized microbes,  turned ocean mud to stone. Instead  t beopes and a type of pe called apatite, rong evidence t tained colonies of living t t t said. “It  as basic as life can get—but it  lived. It propagated.”

    And eventually it led to us.

    If you are into very old rocks, and Bennett indubitably is, to be. to