All of life has a common ancestor. What was LUCA?

Short Wave

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🗓️ 17 January 2025

⏱️ 15 minutes

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Summary

Imagine the tree of life. The tip of every branch represents one species, and if you follow any two branches back through time, you'll hit an intersection. If you keep going back in time, you'll eventually find the common ancestor for all of life. That ancestor is called LUCA, the last universal common ancestor, and there is no fossil record to tell us what it looked like.

Luckily, we have Jonathan Lambert. He's a science correspondent for NPR and today he's talking all things LUCA: What we think this single-celled organism may have looked like, when it lived and why a recent study suggests it could be older and more complex than scientists thought.

Have other questions about ancient biology? Email us at [email protected] — we'd love to hear from you!

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Transcript

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0:00.0	Hey, it's Robin Hilton from NPR Music.
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0:18.4	Find out more and see the official rules at npr.org slash tiny desk contest.
0:24.4	You're listening to Shortwave from NPR. Hey, Shortwaver's Emily Kwong here with a story about your ancestors,
0:34.3	but not your grandparents and not your great-grandparents, nor your great, great, great, great-great, great-great-grandparents.
0:40.9	No, we're talking about the ancestor of all life. All life. And you're just the right person to talk about this with us,
0:48.3	Jonathan Lambert, because before your current stint on the NPR Science Desk, you wrote about this ancestor for Quantum Magazine.
0:53.7	Is this
0:54.5	where all living things descended from? Yes. So they call it Luca, which stands for the
1:01.7	last universal common ancestor, which is no longer alive, but it would have existed billions of
1:07.4	years ago as some kind of single-celled organism. When you say last universal common ancestor, what does that mean?
1:14.7	So imagine for a second the tree of life.
1:17.2	All life.
1:18.0	Yeah, so everything.
1:19.1	So let's start at the branches.
1:21.5	Every living thing on Earth is represented as a tip on the branch of that tree.
1:25.5	Right.
1:25.7	And if you follow any two branches back in time, they converge on their most recent common
	...

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