Life has always been a bit of a mystery because we haven’t had the answers yet. We know most that we need to know are the same way we know the answers to the greatest questions in human history. We know that there are many different ways of living. But what we don’t know is if each of those ways to living is the best way for our species to live.
The answer to that is probably not as simple as we think it is. Even though most of our early ancestors were not totally heterotrophic, they did eat a lot. But there are a lot of unanswered questions about how this began. We dont have the answers, but we do know that it has been happening everywhere as we have been evolving for thousands of years.
There is no “earliest” time period, just when it was happening. For example, we are quite sure that Homo erectus was around when the dinosaurs died out. Yet, as recently as 14,000 years ago, we dont have the earliest hominids, some of which were still very primitive. So, in a way, it doesn’t matter when our ancestors began to eat.
However, even though we can’t say with absolute certainty that our earliest ancestors were heterotrophic, we can say that they are quite likely heterotrophic. As such, there is something quite fishy going on with our current understanding of our evolution. I think most of us have a hard time accepting the idea that all the animals we see today are the result of a long, gradual process of evolution.
The thing that makes me believe this is that most of the evidence we have about the evolutionary history of animals today is still in the form of fossil records, which are so extremely old that they don’t even have the power to change shape. This means that the vast majority of the evidence we can get about how animals evolved over millions of years is still in the form of evidence from fossils. We are always looking for something new because it’s still new.
This is why I find it so interesting that there are still so many very old fossils of animals that are completely heterotrophic, such as the oldest of all modern frogs. The oldest animal on the planet, the earliest animal that has ever existed, was a complete heterotroph. We are looking at its DNA, specifically its mitochondria, to determine how it came to be this heterotroph.
Why is this? Well, a heterotroph’s body is not a single cell, so it doesn’t have to rely on nutrients available in the water. Instead, it takes in carbon dioxide from the atmosphere and uses that as its fuel, and its cells are designed to do this very well. What makes this heterotroph unique is that one of the things it does to produce energy is split a part of its food into two different molecules.
This helps the mitochondria, which are the cells of the cell, to operate more efficiently. This allows cells to do complex things, like using energy to grow, divide, and repair different parts of the cell. It also allows those cells to be bigger and to have more energy, which allows for them to grow bigger and be able to do more complicated things.
Heterotrophs are also the earliest forms of life on Earth because they are the first organisms to actually grow. As the article put it: “The earliest heterotrophic organisms were completely heterotrophic. They weren’t just getting their food from some other organism. They were actually getting their food from a place other than the food they were eating.” I’ve heard this claim before, but I’ve never heard it from a scientist.
Because they were actually heterotrophs, you can see how they can be completely dependent on their external supplies of food. That means they are dependent on gravity. If they can’t get enough food, their bodies go into trouble. But once gravity gets established, they can no longer rely on gravity.
