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Xenophanes of Colophon (570–480 BC) recognized that some fossil shells were remains of shellfish.
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In 1800 Lamarck theorised that living things evolved in a continuously upward direction, from dead matter, through simple to more complex forms.
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Friedrich Wöhler synthesizes urea from oxygen, proving that organisms at one point originated from inorganic chemcai processes.
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Louis Pasteur disocovered that microorganisms cause disease in the mid-late 19th century
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In 1959, Darwin wrote ''The Origin of Species'' in which he hypothesised that the millions of species today branched off and evolved from a single organism.
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In the 1920s, Russian scientist Aleksandr Oparin and English scientist J.B.S. Haldane both separately proposed that life on Earth could have arisen step-by-step from non-living matter through a process of “gradual chemical evolution''.
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In 1953, Stanley Miller and Harold Urey did an experiment to test Oparin and Haldane’s ideas. They found that organic molecules could be spontaneously produced under reducing conditions thought to resemble those of early Earth.
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One meteorite that fell in 2000 in Canada contained tiny organic structures dubbed "organic globules." NASA scientists think this type of meteorite might have fallen to Earth often during the planet's early history, seeding it with organic compounds.