Abstract

The popular trope which depicts the origin of life on earth as emerging from a ?chemical soup? continues to have an enduring hold over the imagination. Of course, whether this ?soup? was a prebiotic puddle on the surface of this third rock from the Sun, originally ?canned?, superheated and pressurised in one of its internal faults, or a kind of extraterrestrial material reheated in some way after having reached the early Earth from elsewhere in universe, may not be known for sure. Nevertheless, advances in sciences such as paleogenomics and paleohistology have shown us that at least a part of the story of the origin of life can be traced in each and every cell of our living bodies.