According to Live Science; Scieists have made a surprising discovery by examining 518 million-year-old fossils in China. These fossils show that the most dista vertebrate ancestors of humans were small, string-like creatures that swam with four eyes in the ancie oceans of the Cambrian era. This discovery, which has had a wide impact in scieific circles, has completely changed our understanding of the origin of vision and the evolutionary process of vertebrates.
Scieifically known as Myllokunmingiids, these creatures were only about three ceimeters long. They are the oldest members of the vertebrate family and the common ancestor of all modern fish, reptiles and mammals. Uil now, complex vision systems were thought to have emerged in much later stages of Earth’s history; But chemical analysis and microscopic imaging of these exceptional fossils in the Chengjiang region of China proved that this animal had two large eyes on the sides and two smaller eyes in the ceer of its face.
Yunnan University and Leicester University researchers believe that all four eyes of this creature were of the “camera” type and had lenses to focus light. One of the members of this research team compares the atmosphere of the oceans at that time to a “dark forest”. In that high-risk environme, having two extra pairs of eyes was a vital advaage for timely ideification of predators and survival.
Another striking poi in this research is the connection between these ancie eyes and the biological structure of our body. These findings make it clear that, in fact, the pineal gland, which is responsible for regulating sleep in the human brain today, is a remna of the real eyes of our ancestors, which was transferred to the brain and changed its use in the course of evolution. In other words, what regulates the body’s biological clock in the depths of our brain today, was an active eye watching the underwater world 500 million years ago.
The discovery is evidence that the engine of evolution designed the most complex sensory tools io the bodies of our early ancestors much faster than previously thought.
