The Pre-Cambrian Era: It Was Boring - Beatrice the Biologist

The Pre-Cambrian era is the time between the formation of earth and the beginnings of complex life in the cambrian era. Things were much simpler back then. You know how you look back on your childhood, and think, man, things were so much easier back then? That’s what the Pre-Cambrian era is for the Earth. She misses the good ol’ days, before all of us horribly complicated everything.

The Pre-Cambrian era accounts for 85% of the history of earth, which is too bad for the Earth because it was, to put it lightly, really boring. I’d say it was like 3.9 billion years of crickets chirping,

but there were no crickets.

I’d also like to say it was like a vast expanse of nothingness with but a lone tumbleweed blowing by, but alas, there were no tumbleweeds either. It was consumingly, completely, and downright super-ridiculously boring. (Kind of like my day at work today, but don’t tell my boss I said that. I need to pay my bills and get acupuncture treatments.)

The first cell appeared around 3.8 billion years ago. He was really lonely. Think of the time you felt most alone in the world and multiply that by a jillion, and you won’t even come close to how alone the first cell was.

Lucky for him, and us, he did make more cells, though. So it all worked out okay.

These first cells in the Pre-Cambrian era weren’t floating around saying, “Like, ohmygod, it’s totally the Pre-Cambrian era. Cool beans, yo.” They didn’t say anything about the Pre-Cambrian era at all.

No. Even if the first cells were self-aware, they wouldn’t know it was the Pre-Cambrian era. We just call it that from our viewpoint now–the same way that Aristotle wasn’t all like “Hey, it’s 350BC, bitches.” He didn’t know that. (He also may or may not have worded it that way.) He knew nearly everything else there was to know at the time, but not what year it was by our current year-counting standards.

Pfffft, Aristotle. Figure it out.

Instead of discussing what geologic era the cells were in, they busied themselves by multiplying and figuring out how to do photosynthesis. The first cells figured it out around 3 billion years ago, and they got BUSY. They churned out so much oxygen, that it completely changed the climate of the planet and set up favorable conditions for the evolution of some upcoming oxygen-breathing fellas in the Paleozoic era, starting with the Cambrian explosion.

I’ll talk about explosions next week, and until then, I’ll leave you with this: