The fact that you, or I, or any living creature, is here at all is a series of astonishing strokes of luck stretching back more than 4 billion years. One of the biggest hurdles was the very first one: How did life emerge from a primordial soup of stuff that very much wasn't alive? A radical new study, published in Science Advances, suggests that this unlikely threshold may actually have been crossed not once, but twice.

The fact that you, or I, or any living creature, is here at all is a series of astonishing strokes of luck stretching back more than 4 billion years. One of the biggest hurdles…

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