https://phys.org/news/2018-11-high-resolution-atomic-movie-photosynthesis-date.html

When Earth formed about 4.5 billion years ago, the planet's landscape was almost nothing like what it is today. Junko Yano, one of the authors of the study and a senior scientist at Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, describes it as "hellish." Meteors sizzled through a carbon dioxide-rich atmosphere and volcanoes flooded the surface with magmatic seas.

Over the next 2.5 billion years, water vapor accumulating in the air started to rain down and form oceans where the very first life appeared in the form of single-celled organisms. But it wasn't until one of those specks of life mutated and developed the ability to harness light from the sun and turn it into energy, releasing oxygen molecules from water in the process, that Earth started to evolve into the planet it is today. This process, oxygenic photosynthesis, is considered one of nature's crown jewels and has remained relatively unchanged in the more than 2 billion years since it emerged.