well yes; technically they use one base-pair as the origin of life (which is probably still a little too small).

From looking at the graph, and the 300 milion year doubling, they seem to put life complexity at about 256 base-pairs at the origin of the earth.

There should be a link to the actual paper in the article.

That goes below a discontinuity, 256 base pairs is well below the smallest organism ever observed. A single gene is on average around 10^4 bases, and the simplest organisms have around 10^3 necessary genes. Life below 10^3 base pairs may not evolve at the same speed. It's certainly not safe to talk about it in terms of base pairs, in that era there might not have even been any.

> smallest organism ever observed

...today. Life was simpler back in the day. For example, RNA world. This more primitive life might not survive more sophisticated life. (thougn it's also possible it's still around, but we haven't noticed it; or haven't recognized it as life).

IDK if small enough, but viruses are simpler.

If it can reproduce - e.g. a short strand of DNA or RNA or even something simpler - it could form the beginnings of "life" as a precursor, even though it wouldn't meet our current definitions of "alive".

There's theories of fatty spheres being the first "cells" (really, "kinda sorta cells").