The research is on what is referred to as LUCA - the Last Universal Common Ancestor of all animals, plants and single cell creatures that exist today. Crucially, that is not the same as the very earliest life on Earth. There is thought to be other simpler life that led to LUCA.
The research is surprising in its implications. It finds LUCA was very complex very early on in Earth’s history. In fact, very soon after any life was possible at all (300 million years after the Moon was formed), it was already a complex life form that coded for and used 2,600 different proteins.
The implication? Either life forms much more easily than we thought, and is thus more common elsewhere than we might expect. Intriguingly, this also boosts the argument for Panspermia. That is the idea that space dust from asteroid-planet collisions, that is travelling throughout the galaxy, is seeding life as it lands on new planets.
The problem with panspermia is that it doesn’t solve the problem of how life started, it just moves the problem to a different planet/asteroid. We still don’t understand what the initial impetus was
