WASHINGTON, DC: An Indian American scientist is claiming that he has finally found a definitive answer to the question of how life on Earth originally started.

Sankar Chatterjee, the curator of paleontology and a professor of geo-sciences at Texas Tech University (TTU), is proposing the notion that multiple comets and meteorites impacted with the Earth during and just after its initial formation some 4.5 billion years ago. These collisions by other celestial bodies created craters in the Earth that held the chemicals necessary to create such basic things as water, oxygen, nitrogen, and the essential elements for simple bacterial life.

“This is bigger than finding any dinosaur,” Chatterjee said about his findings, which were first presented to the world at the Geological Society of America’s annual meeting last week, in Denver, Colorado. “[It] is what we have all searched for: the Holy Grail of science.”

Chatterjee’s announcement comes from his studying of three crater sites – located in Greenland, Australia, and South Africa – that hold the world’s oldest known fossilized remains. He called the young Earth, in which the essential elements of life were first created, “a bizarre and isolated world that would seem like a vision of hell with the foul smells of hydrogen sulfide, methane, nitric oxide and steam that provided life-sustaining energy.”

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