I note this in the article, "Earth formed about 4.5 billion years ago, but it immediately suffered countless collisions, including one big enough to tear a chunk out of our planet and create the moon. Eventually, things settled down enough for life to appear, sometime between 4.5 billion and 3.7 billion years ago. Those early life-forms were almost certainly very different from modern-day ones. That's because modern-day life-forms require three macromolecules: DNA, RNA and proteins. Very roughly, our DNA stores information, the RNA transmits that information to manufacture proteins, and the proteins do most of the work of keeping life alive — including replicating DNA."
We do know when the oldest microorganism fossils are dated now, 4.28 billion years old using zircons. Here is the report. 'Canadian bacteria-like fossils called oldest evidence of life',
https://www.reuters.com/article/us-science-life-idUSKBN16858B, 01-March-2017
"WASHINGTON (Reuters) - Microfossils up to almost 4.3 billion years old found in Canada of microbes are similar to the bacteria that thrive today around sea floor hydrothermal vents and may represent the oldest-known evidence of life on Earth, scientists said on Wednesday."...“It is also important for the evolution of life. It shows that some microbes have not changed significantly” since Earth’s early times, Papineau said. Earth formed about 4.5 billion years ago and the oceans appeared about 4.4 billion years ago. If the fossils are indeed 4.28 billion years old, that would suggest “an almost instantaneous emergence of life” after ocean formation, Dodd said. The fossils appear to be older than any other previously discovered evidence of life. For example, other scientists last year described 3.7 billion-year-old fossilized microbial mats, called stromatolites, from Greenland."
So we have life on earth 4.28 billion years ago, life that exhibits little or no change from present microorganisms living under a Faint Young Sun, a Moon still in the lunar magma ocean (formed 4.48 billion years ago and took at least 200 million years to cool), much closer to the Earth, and catastrophic bombardment rates operating all over the Earth, other reports show the Archean could be 10x the rate previously accepted.
The picture of Charles Darwin postulated warm little pond for the origin of life from non-living matter is becoming more and more interesting to examine in detail. Apparently we can replace Charles Darwin warm little pond with a much better solution and warm little pond now as the article states.
"In their work, the researchers found that hydrogen cyanide can rain out of the atmosphere into warm little ponds, where the compound begins its molecular dance with other naturally occurring molecules. They found that during a 100 million year-long period some 4.4 billion years ago, the amount of hydrogen cyanide raining into ponds was enough to create high concentrations of adenine, one of the components of RNA."
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