Student discovers life is 400 million years older than we thought it was

The world’s oldest fossilised plants have been found in rocks in central India, pushing back the first evolution of complex life on Earth by hundreds of millions of years. It is a finding that suggests the so-called ‘Cambrian Explosion’ of plant and animal life about 600 million years ago may have taken much longer to develop than previously thought. A student in Sweden made the stunning discovery while examining seemingly innocuous fossilised microbes dating from 1.6 billion years ago taken from rocks in Chitrakoot, central India.

http://www.independent.co.uk