<P> Common descent describes how, in evolutionary biology, a group of organisms share a most recent common ancestor . There is evidence of common descent that all life on Earth is descended from the last universal common ancestor (LUCA). In July 2016, scientists reported identifying a set of 355 genes from the LUCA of all organisms living on Earth . </P> <P> Common ancestry between organisms of different species arises during speciation, in which new species are established from a single ancestral population . Organisms which share a more recent common ancestor are more closely related . The most recent common ancestor of all currently living organisms is the last universal ancestor, which lived about 3.9 billion years ago . The two earliest evidences for life on Earth are graphite found to be biogenic in 3.7 billion - year - old metasedimentary rocks discovered in western Greenland and microbial mat fossils found in 3.48 billion - year - old sandstone discovered in Western Australia . All currently living organisms on Earth share a common genetic heritage (universal common descent), with each being the descendant from a single original species, though the suggestion of substantial horizontal gene transfer during early evolution has led to questions about monophyly of life . </P> <P> Universal common descent through an evolutionary process was first proposed by the English naturalist Charles Darwin in On the Origin of Species (1859), which concluded: "There is grandeur in this view of life, with its several powers, having been originally breathed into a few forms or into one; and that, whilst this planet has gone cycling on according to the fixed law of gravity, from so simple a beginning endless forms most beautiful and most wonderful have been, and are being, evolved ." </P> <P> In the 1740s, French mathematician Pierre Louis Maupertuis made the first known suggestion in a series of essays that all organisms may have had a common ancestor, and that they had diverged through random variation and natural selection . In Essai de cosmologie (1750), Maupertuis noted: </P>

Who is credited with linking characteristics of living organisms to past ancestors