"Nano-tomography and nano-XRF analyses to investigate 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. Cooperation and sociality are the well- known mechanisms for dealing with environmental stress and the evolution of complexity, 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 Archaean cellular microfossils. This study will document for the first time the “sociobiological aspects” of the unusually large prokaryotes during the Archaean and provide clues related to their subsequent disappearance in the later history of the geological time till date.