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Question
Does all life on Earth share a common single-celled ancestor? If so, what is it called?
All life on Earth seems to share a common ancestry, and this last common ancestor is called simply the Last Universal Common Ancestor (LUCA), or sometimes just LUA, Last Common Ancestor. You can read about it on the web, for instance in the Wikipedia article at http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Last_universal_ancestor or at http://www.actionbioscience.org/newfrontiers/poolearticle.html. LUCA (or LUA) does not survive today, of course, but some of its properties can be reconstructed from a comparison of the genetic code of species that do still live on Earth. David Morrison
NAI Senior Scientist
January 15, 2008
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