Surely everything scientists discover 'rewrites' our understanding of something? That's the whole point isn't it? Interesting article though.

No, why? A discovery can fit in with your existing models, maybe even be predicted. You discover it, but you don't change your understanding, only expand it.

Lots of discoveries are confirmatory. We already believed relativity was true before we observed observing binary pulsars obeying it.

You're right of course, but some editor thought it too cumbersome (and not so sensational) to write "fills a major gap in our understanding of the early evolution of eukaryotes", so they wrote "history" instead which allows much more room for the imagination.

Or not. Link now 404s. Looks like the article was withdrawn.

works fine for me?

PEBKAC

This article linked to https://www.nature.com/articles/s41586-023-06170-w

> Lost world of complex life and the late rise of the eukaryotic crown

Cheers. That looks more interesting than the other headline too.

Some many chances for early life to have hung on, delayed change, stalled evolution. These early organisms hung on for 100's of millions of years, dominating and out-competing later forms until gradually they were in turn out-competed.

Same with Dinosaurs! They dominated for 200M years. But for a chance asteroid we could still be a planet of dinosaurs. No sign of them giving up in the fossil record.

We find other planets with life, likely will be stalled in one of these cul-de-sacs. Our own existance can be explained by observer's paradox - we didn't get stalled which is why we're here which is why we can wonder about these things!

>> No sign of them giving up in the fossil record.

Actually there are signs in the fossil record that dinosaurs weren't doing very well even before the K–Pg extinction.

Some context: between 1.8 and 0.8 billion (milliard) years ago, the Earth went through a period colloquially called the "Boring Billion", when tectonically and climatically almost nothing happened. Evolutionarily, however, this was the period when multicellularity and sexual reproduction developed. I guess that those developments were really complicated, so it took a lot of time before evolution chanced upon them.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Boring_Billion

https://youtu.be/0sbwUeTyDb0 (recommended video and series)

I've read somewhere that we're the second wave of multi-cellular organisms that evolved on Earth - coming from worms, fish, tetrapods, etc. But there's evidence of an earlier evolution of multi-cellularity, those poor things dying out and leaving very few fossils.

Maybe you are referring to the Ediacaran period: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ediacaran_biota , which happened a bit later. Something like it can have happened before that as well, but that is more the subject of current research like in the featured article.