Life: It may have been up earlier in the universal morning than we expected.

White smokers emitting liquid rich in barium, calcium, silicon and carbon dioxide at the Champagne vent, Northwest Eifuku volcano, Marianas Trench Marine National Monument.

There are certain fundamental questions that most of us ask at one or more points in our life. One of the questions — how did life begin — spans disciplines across the field. It requires chemistry, biology, geology, and planetary science to even begin to approach, and as we get better at working together to study our solar system, the possible story of life only gets more interesting.

Trying to understand the earliest periods of our world’s history is complicated by the lack of ancient land preserved in our current landscape. Only a couple of places retain relics of the most distant past. One of those regions is Quebec’s Nuvvuagittuq Supracrustal Belt (NSB). This band of rock was once part of an ancient sea floor, located near hydrothermal vents. In the modern ocean, we find life clinging to the sides of similar vents that release heat and various nutrients. This is life that requires no sunlight — it thrives in its own deepwater ecosystem.

The rocks in the Nuvvuagittuq Supracrustal Belt are between 3.75 and 4.28 billion years old — and researchers have gone fossil hunting in these rocks. Researchers cut a fist-sized rock into narrow slices, and scanned them with microscopes to look for signs of biological structures. While many of the possible bacterial life they found — things that…