Earliest fossilized window of sociality recorded from lensoidal to spheroidal microfossils during the Archaean

Conditions on the early Earth were hostile with intense UV radiation, but cells still managed to adapt and thrive. The evolution of new metabolic pathways is the obvious route by which cells coped with environmental pressures, however, the social lives of cells were just as important (West et al. 2007). Cooperation and sociality are the well-known mechanisms for dealing with environmental stress and the evolution of complexity (Durand et al. 2016), but how this played out in the earliest prokaryote groups is unknown. A palaeontological angle to this issue is almost entirely unexplored and represents a huge gap in knowledge. We wish to address this gap, by examining the earliest fossilized evidence of sociality in robust lensoidal to spheroidal microbes. This study will document for the first time the “sociobiological aspects” of the unusually large prokaryotes during the Archaean.