All Of Life Has A Common Ancestor. What Was LUCA?
Short Wave
NPR
4.7 • 6K Ratings
🗓️ 17 January 2025
⏱️ 13 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
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!
Listen to every episode of Short Wave sponsor-free and support our work at NPR by signing up for Short Wave+ at plus.npr.org/shortwave.
Learn more about sponsor message choices: podcastchoices.com/adchoices
NPR Privacy Policy
Transcript
Click on a timestamp to play from that location
| 0:00.0 | What's in store for the music, TV, and film industries for 2025? We don't know, but we're making some fun, bold predictions for the new year. Listen now to the Pop Culture Happy Hour podcast from NPR. You're listening to Shortwave from NPR. |
| 0:19.7 | Hey, Shortwaver's Emily Kwong here with a story about your ancestors, but not your grandparents |
| 0:25.4 | and not your great-grandparents, nor your great, great, great, great, great-great-great-great-grandparents. |
| 0:30.9 | No, we're talking about the ancestor of all life. |
| 0:33.5 | All life. And you're just the right person to talk about this with us, Jonathan Lambert, |
| 0:39.0 | because before your current stint on the NPR science desk, you wrote about this ancestor for Quantum Magazine. |
| 0:44.0 | Is this where all living things descended from? |
| 0:48.6 | Yes. So they call it Luca, which stands for the last universal common ancestor, which is no longer alive, but it would |
| 0:56.0 | have existed billions of years ago as some kind of single-celled organism. When you say last |
| 1:01.4 | universal common ancestor, what does that mean? So imagine for a second the tree of life. |
| 1:07.2 | All life. Yeah, so everything. So let's start at the branches. |
| 1:15.4 | Every living thing on earth is represented as a tip on the branch of that tree. |
| 1:15.7 | Right. |
| 1:21.7 | And if you follow any two branches back in time, they converge on their most recent common ancestor. |
| 1:28.0 | So like chimps and humans, for instance, converge on a common ancestor that lived like less than 10 million years ago. |
| 1:42.5 | If you keep tracing any path of ancestry back far enough, whether you start with gorillas or sharks or ginkgo trees or those neat bacteria that live in the bowels of the earth, you'll eventually reach the same single point. |
| 1:46.1 | That's Luca. That's the ancestor of every living thing and every dead thing that we know about. Grandma. Wow. That's awesome. Why do we want to know |
| 1:53.8 | about Luca? Scientists want to understand what it was like because it gets at this really |
| 1:58.6 | fundamental question of where we, as in all life on Earth, |
| 2:02.7 | came from. And here's a new development. A team of scientists took the biggest swing yet at trying |
| 2:07.6 | to paint a picture of Luca through some pretty tricky detective work. So today on the show, |
| 2:12.3 | how scientists use clues from life today to uncover what our last universal common ancestor may have looked like. |
... |
Please login to see the full transcript.
Disclaimer: The podcast and artwork embedded on this page are from NPR, and are the property of its owner and not affiliated with or endorsed by Tapesearch.
Generated transcripts are the property of NPR and are distributed freely under the Fair Use doctrine. Transcripts generated by Tapesearch are not guaranteed to be accurate.
Copyright © Tapesearch 2025.