When microbiologist Mitchell Sogin decided to trace human evolution to its roots, he had no idea he might find sponges.
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The only thing older in the same line, the line leading directly to animals and to us, are the fungi. “This is revolutionary,” Sogin says, pushing back thick, graying hair. “Animals and sponges share a common evolutionary history from fungi.”
Until Sogin was able to prove otherwise, “we thought fungi were related to plants or somehow were just colorless plants,” he says. “Plants had seeds, fungi had spores, and so on. Scientists used to publish fungi articles in plant journals. But the work does not support that. We’ve shown that fungi and plants are very different from each other, and fungi are actually more closely related to animals.” With a pen, he taps his evolutionary tree sketch. Green plants form one branch, and the fungi and animals are farther along on another branch.
Does all this mean humans are just highly evolved mushrooms? “I’d say we share a common, unique evolutionary history with fungi,” Sogin says. “There was a single ancestral group of organisms, and some split off to become fungi and some split off to become animals.” The latter have become us.