English term
3.5 billion years of living ancestors
hopefully I’ve understood correctly the sentence “3.5 billion years of them”. I think it means: “we have had 'living’ ancestors for 3.5 billion years”, in the sense that living beings first appeared 3.5 billion years ago...
What’s your opinion?
Thank you so much for your help!
Let’s see how identity – the characteristics that identify a center of experience – looks throughout our ancestral history and across species. If we are to identify one characteristic of who you and I are across time, we might say that we are comprised of matter. (...)
As living beings (...) we moved from the whole universe of matter, which was another layer, to another criterion of our identity: living. *** Now we have living ancestors – 3.5 billion years of them. ***
If we continue up this probability axis, focusing even more narrowly and constraining our belonging, we might say that part of our identity as animals began about 800 million years ago with the emergence of sponges; and then developed further 530 million years ago, when our vertebrate ancestors arose in our evolutionary history. Somewhere around 310 million years ago, we left our fish and amphibian forebears and inhabited the land as reptiles. Then we attained fur and gave birth to our offspring as mammals about 210 million years ago. This is a rough overview of our belonging in the evolutionary journey from prelife days to living as mammals in the air-borne world of this planet.
Non-PRO (1): Yvonne Gallagher
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Responses
France
Passionnée du mot juste.
Native in: French 
, English
Works in: French to English, English to French, English, and 1 more.
We have had ancestors for 3.5 billion years.
| Thank you so much, Victoria, for your help! |
Poland
Translator since 2006 into PL/EN
Native in: Polish , English 
Works in: English to Polish, Polish to English, Chinese to Polish, and 15 more.
Our first ancestors have appeared 3.5 billion years ago
| Thank you so much for your contribution! |
Discussion