A team led by the Japan Agency for Marine-Earth Science and Technology analysed ancient sediment samples deposited more than 100m years ago on the seabed of the South Pacific.
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The region is renowned for having far fewer nutrients in its sediment than normal, making it a far-from-ideal site to maintain life over millennia.
The team incubated the samples to help coax the microbes out of their epoch-spanning slumber.
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